Building a functioning DAW within the limitations of a web browser seems impossible, right? Even supporting the most basic functions, like importing and storing various audio formats, can be a huge challenge. But at BandLab, we’ve found that challenging the limitations can lead to the best discoveries, and ultimately, an awesome creative platform.
Pushing those limits.
We work in Chrome, which offers BandLab users access to their sessions from almost any computer. Browsers can have certain limitations, but it’s our job to push to find creative solutions that work best within them. Through a combination of our web services and API, as well as pushing web audio to its limits, we can find creative solutions to most challenges.
Why Web Audio works.
The BandLab web Mix Editor is the very foundation of the BandLab creation experience, and it relies completely on the web audio API. Every aspect of music creation within BandLab is made with this technology, ranging from simple panning to amp simulations. Web audio offers the most basic building blocks for us to build quality and accessible sounds for our users and we’ve pushed every aspect of the API to the limit thanks to our talented web and audio teams. If you wander around BandLab HQ, you’ll find us experimenting and working to improve user experience, sound quality and performance across our platform every single day.
From a sound standpoint, a great example of what we’ve been able to harness is the waveshaper. We use it to model the nonlinear distortion found in many amps and guitar overdrive pedals. We’re able to model amp cabinets and reverbs using web audio’s convolution engine, and we can even create accurate synthetic reverbs using combination of delays, allpass and comb filters. Even our simple effects can have complex signal flows between audio nodes, combining to create a sonically pleasing result.
A better cross-platform experience.
We’re proud to be the first to accurately represent the capabilities of browser audio across all mobile platforms. That means any effect created within Chrome is accurately represented within both our iOS and Android applications natively. We do this by recreating the web audio API almost completely in native code. By doing this, we’re able to easily test and design new audio features that are guaranteed to be platform agnostic. And by giving people more ways to make music, we can be sure that we’re getting BandLab out there for a range of users and fans.
We are always looking for passionate and talented people to join our team. If you are interested in joining our team you can send a CV to hr@bandlab.com.
