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Wavepot Lets Users Code Their Own Detroit Techno Beats Online

The new tool's open-source developers are hoping to make the site the next great digital audio workstation.

Since the '90s, a range of digital audio workstations (DAWs) like Logic Pro and Ableton Live, as well as with virtual studio technologies (VSTs) for instrument and effects plugins, have helped revolutionize music production, especially within the realm of electronic music. With the recently released Wavepot, a new code-based music creation platform, a flexible electronic music production workstation could soon be coming to the web, a realm where functional DAWs have remained conspicuously absent.

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As its creators note, Wavepot, an open-source and collaborative JavaScript-based project, is a work in progress. The current plan is to let users jam on it, while the community continues to raise funds to further develop the technology.

"Development is split into milestones on which the features are discussed and decided upon in the mailing list with the help of the community," the Wavepot website explains. "A funding campaign is then setup for each next milestone which supports development and keeps the project up and alive."

Wavepot's open-source developers see the platform as a blank canvas, where everyone is invited to contribute. Together, they hope to build "the sweetest audio platform ever." Charming, but ambitious.

While certainly neat, it's primitive.

As noted on the Wavepot Hacker News user discussion board, Wavepot is not really a proper Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) at this point. It can't perform the complex audio recording and editing tasks of, say, Logic, Cubase, or Ableton, which most musicians and producers, whether creating electronic music or not, regularly use. But that's precisely what the developers aim to do with Wavepot.

So, what do Wavepot users get right now in its current incarnation?

After being greeted with a message describing Wavepot as a live editor, users are told that they can create a function named "dsp," which accepts a coefficient of time named "t" that is used to generate a single sample. The smallest sample is, as the site notes, a simple sine wave.

As can be seen in the "303" demo's code, users can set BPM (beats per minute), synth tunings, transpositions (changes in pitch), and they can swap through oscillator types, including sin, triangle, square, and sawtooth waveforms. These oscillators are the bread and butter of any synthesized sound, so it's really quite neat to see an audio editor do this online. Users can also edit a synth arpeggiator (cascading up or down synth notes), filters (for techno sweeps), and noise levels.

A tour through the Wavepot site reveals a number of demos. Upon clicking the first, "Afternoon Walk," users see a bunch of code, which, when they hit the play button, triggers an 8-bit-esque song with cascading synth arpeggios. While certainly neat, it's primitive. The demo "303," so named after the Roland TB-303 drum machine, is far more complex, sounding like some of the '80s and early-'90s best Detroit techno, complete with a slow and smooth filter sweep.

The Wavepot community's first planned milestone is to help fund development that will enable "user profiles, project saving and sharing, module library, audio record and download, code export, debug console and settings." All of this will be instrumental into making Wavepot into an online DAW. Other milestones will be added in the future.

In just a few days of existence, Wavepot surpassed its modest fundraising goal of $2,000, which can be paid in Dogecoin, Bitcoin, or via PayPal. While it is, as TechCrunch noted, more of a digital signal processor at this point, if the funds and the coding talent are there, Wavepot could become a really interesting tool in the electronic music producer's arsenal.