
Europa: Browser-Based AudioWorklet Synth - errozero
https://www.propellerheads.se/europa
======
codeulike
Ah, Reason. Has such fun with that back in 2004 and interesting to see its
still going now.

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

~~~
teilo
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.

~~~
nxcho
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

~~~
teilo
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?

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

~~~
cromwellian
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.

~~~
tomxor
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.

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

~~~
cageface
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.

~~~
wildrhythms
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?

~~~
cageface
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.

