Europa: Browser-Based AudioWorklet Synth | Hacker News Reader

Europa: Browser-Based AudioWorklet Synth

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44 pointserrozero14 comments

Ah, Reason. Has such fun with that back in 2004 and interesting to see its still going now.

Got Reason last year and love it! Europa is awesome. Why do I need it on the web on desktop?..

Well, one reason is that, unlike in Reason, you don't need a magnifying glass to use it on a higher-res display. Honestly. We are at Reason 10 and there is still no interface scaling or retina support.

A better question is: Why can't I have it in a VST? ReWire is a PITA.

Unless I'm missing something they are selling Europa as a VST/AU and I guess the web version is more of an interactive demo

Woah! I totally missed that. This is a first. And it's free for Reason 10 owners. The product key was already in my account when I logged in. And is has a scalable UI.

I wonder if this is a foretaste of things to come? Maybe Thor next? Please?

It's a nice quick way to try out a demo if you are thinking of buying it.

Excellent... but shame the latency absolutely sucks :( I guess that's some limitation of webAudio or something? no way you can play this live.

You need Chrome 66 or later, or launch Chrome 64+ with command line option --enable-blink-features=AudioWorklet otherwise you're probably getting a polyfill.

Tried that now... still lots of latency, if I pick sound with short attack so it should be punchy... then tap the keyboard fast, the sound is generated on the up after my finger has pressed the key. So it's pretty disorientating to actually perform on unless you are only interested in soft pads :P

To be fair this might just be linux on this machine, it's an old mac and I had only run software synths on it in OS X before (which were playable, but I know xnu has been tweaked with low latency audio in mind), maybe I need one of those special linux kernels to get low latency on this old thing.

on my audio pc(imac pro) with low latency hardware its playing with no latency at all. Im sure webaudio is a factor but it can work

Loved Reason and my old maudio controller. Blew me away how solid their software ran on my underpowered computer.

Sadly those days are long gone. The current version of Reason is the least efficient DAW I have by a long margin, at least on my MacBook.

As a long-time Logic user who frankly has just never bothered to try anything else, is there anything I'm missing by not trying Reason?

There's a lot to like about Reason. The built-in instruments really hit a sweet spot between flexibility and ease of use. And the semi-modular design makes it easy to do things that are hard or downright impossible in more conventional DAWs. And there are some great rack extensions like Nostromo that don't really have any direct counterparts in the VST world.

I also like the way that the blocks method of arranging a song works.

Reason also has some serious shortcomings though like a very basic piano roll and, at least lately, very bad performance. I'm not sure what happened there because it used to be the most efficient DAW on my system by far but now it uses 2-3x the CPU that Logic or Live do, at least on my machine.

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