We love discovering tools that escape other media’s notice, since there are lots of beautiful and useful projects out there that no one’s talking about. Yet.
This time, we’d like to give a shoutout to these three tools that've caught our attention this week.
Ambiphone, a minimalist ambient sound mixer
“Ambiphone is a minimalist ambient sound mixer that lets you create soundscapes out of music and sounds. It uses carefully picked sounds and lossless compression for brilliant sound quality, and it's free,” the project creator shares on Reddit.
So basically, this is a website with sounds that you can listen to in the background while working, studying, meditating, doing yoga, or even when trying to fall asleep. The player works offline, so you won't even need an Internet connection to listen to those tunes. Ambiphone can also loop tracks for as long as you need, and if you're going to use it primarily to help you fall asleep, you can set a sleep timer (the 🌙 in the bottom left), which will fade out gradually.
Besides, you can create your own mixes from existing melodies and save them.
According to the Ambiphone's creator, it's built in Vue.js, and most of the sounds come from freesound.org and freemusicarchive.org. All melodies are either in the public domain or licensed under Creative Commons.
"Sounds are played via JS AudioBuffers and encoded as FLAC to ensure they loop seamlessly (mp3 and some other lossy formats add silence to the beginning or end of the file which makes looping very hard)," the creator shares on Reddit.
Verdict: Ambiphone is very intuitive and comprehensive, so you won't have a hard time figuring out how to use it. The project will also have an Android app.
Drumhaus, a web-based drum machine
So... basically the subtitle: Drumhaus is a drum machine that you can use right in your browser. Created by a Los Angeles-based software engineer Max Fung, Drumhaus is built using Next.js and Tone.js and is a funny, easy-to-use pocket drum kit.
"I'm an amateur music producer, and have always been fascinated by the music software I use in my creative process. I wanted to build this project as a way to combine my love for music with my passion for coding, and dive deep into digital audio engineering and web development. I wanted to reimagine the form of a classic drum machine in a web browser with modern software technologies," shares Max on Reddit. "Drumhaus contains a curated assortment of sample kits and presets to help you craft the perfect groove. Its sequencer allows you to program two variations of 16th note loops on eight instruments. It was designed to be compact, open-source, and free to use for anyone interested in music production."
According to the project's GitHub page, Drumhaus has Kits, which are curated groups of samples that can be swapped as a group on the fly, pre-loaded presets (users can also make their own custom presets), the sequencer that can program two variations of 16th note loops per sample ( A, B, AB, and AAAB), sample processing, master processing, audio visualisation, and a lot more stuff.
If you're interested in what's under the hood, you can take a look at the project's GitHub page for more details.
Riffusion, a website that turns your voice into a song
Last but not least is Riffusion, a website where you can record yourself singing or talking, and get a song in different styles as a result.
Or you can simply type something, and the tool will make song from that, too. If you don't know what exactly you want to write, Riffusion has a randomiser that generates the prompt and creates a song based on that.
