Show HN: 8bars – Make Music in the Browser | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 8bars – Make Music in the Browser

8bars.app

59 pointsamadeuspagel18 comments

Nice work! One small suggestion to improve the UI would be to use cursor: col-resize on the edges of the notes to show they are draggable and change the length as the user drags to give visual feedback.

Thanks :) I've implemented cursor: col-resize, but due to the hacky way the note grid works, it's kind of hard to implement visual feedback when dragging.

Wow quick turn around!

Awesome. It seems to me the browser has eaten almost everything but music creation. That is too bad, because each year sounds seems more important in social networks.

I suggest disabling autoplay when you open the link. I got startled pretty badly with the very loud and unexpected beeping sounds

I think autoplay is important to draw people in, but I'll implement master volume control, and set it to 50% by default.

EDIT: Done.

EDIT2: I've disabled autoplay anyway, because on some browsers it doesn't work properly.

I think not having sawtooth be the default would also help a lot.

Until you click in Chrome, it's not allowing the playing of any sounds. At which point, it plays everything that's been queued up. Even at 50% volume, dozens of sawtooth samples laid out on top of each other playing simultaneously is not pleasant.

I think you could easily prevent both by just having a button that takes up 1/4 the screen that says something like "Play Demo ". After that, you get your interaction event and people get their warning.

(That was meant to be a https://emojipedia.org/musical-note/ in the Play Demo button but apparently HN strips these. Which makes sense!)

Wow that sucks. I've disabled autoplay.

I just visited, post 50% volume adjustment (I love this sort of thing!), and immediately my speakers crunched with sawtooth grunge and other sounds. I don't think I've ever closed a tab faster. You really should take parsecs' advice and disable the autoplay.

If anyone else is planning on checking it out, make sure to set your speakers or headphones to the lowest volume possible first to avoid destroying your speakers and ears.

Sorry, I've disabled autoplay.

this is really good. this is the second project about javascript music I've seen on HN. I would love to learn more about music so I could take a shot at creating procedural music for games.

I see a blank screen on iPhone. It’s fine if you don’t want to support all browsers but you should show a message if the browser isn’t supported. For all I know it’s still loading

Edit fixed! Works on iPhone now!

Could you check the console, and tell me if there's some kind of error message?

And could you try checking the website without private browsing on? The website requires localStorage, and if that doesn't work, I guess the execution stops there, and it doesn't show anything. See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12630396/localstorage-no...

> Could you check the console, and tell me if there's some kind of error message?

The error message → “ReferenceError: Can't find variable: AudioContext”

You can’t do this in some browsers → “c = new AudioContext” [1]

You need to wrap this API in a condition like so [2]

[1] https://caniuse.com/#search=AudioContext

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/29373891

Thanks, I implemented your suggestion. Hope it works now.

Thanks, a really neat tool to create some interesting music piece.

Thanks for making and sharing, fun!

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