
Show HN: Sawtooth – Online audio workspace - myzie
https://www.sawtooth.io
======
jensenbox
I find myself asking questions that could easily be answered with a demo or
some sort of try before signup.

The idea of everything I click on going to the signup page really is a huge
turn off and personally I consider it to be a poor user first experience.

You should add some sort of something that allows me to see what you are about
before making me sign up. I don't even know what I get if I sign up.

Otherwise, I am sure you have done a great job.

~~~
myzie
Thanks, you are right. I should add more content up front so that everyone can
get a better idea how it works without having to sign up.

~~~
andybak
Even better - the home page should be the app itself. Only prompt people to
register for an account when they've created something they might want to
save.

~~~
andai
This is what I was expecting.

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cyberferret
As a frequent user of SoundCloud, Gobbler and plain old DropBox to share audio
files among fans and colleagues in the industry, I am wondering what the
advantage of Sawtooth could be?

I see that you have filters etc., but given that I would rather adjust EQ and
effects on my tracks on my own DAW with virtually no latency, I don't know
that I would actually do that on a web platform with all the vagaries of lag,
dropped signals etc.?

Plus the fact that most audio people have their favourite 'go to' plugins for
reverb, delay, chorus etc. as VST/AU plugins that they pull into their DAW -
it seems that Sawtooth straddles that line between being a quick 'grab an
audio recording snippet for sharing' and a full fledged web based DAW.

I am assuming a 'use case' for this would be to capture a song or riff idea
while I was sitting in a hotel room between travelling etc., but to be honest,
I have a lot of iPhone apps for doing that and posting directly to the sites I
mentioned above. To make Sawtooth compelling, it would probably have to supply
some rudimentary DAW like capabilities, such as perhaps a metronome, some sort
of ability to do basic MIDI patterns with uploaded samples, and perhaps some
rudimentary multi track ability - even 3 or 4 tracks would be great for doing
basic song ideas to send to my band members.

~~~
myzie
Gobbler looks great. Have you used the collaboration features and have they
worked well for you?

One of the goals is to streamline the experience of navigating and listening
to sets of files. If it's built correctly, then using Sawtooth should be a
smoother experience than managing where your files live in your Dropbox
folders, having it sync them, finding them on another computer, then listening
with a separate media player or the player in your OS file navigator (thinking
of Finder on MacOS).

This is not meant to replace any of your desktop DAWs. If anything, it could
interoperate with them in certain cases, if people are interested in that.
Maybe an API would be handy for others developing websites or apps that work
with audio.

I'd like Sawtooth to keep simple audio work really simple. I suspect it's easy
to overwhelm newcomers to the audio world with complicated UIs (which are
necessary for advanced work).

Gobbler for example seems very geared towards musicians and music creation,
which is great for many. But there are also lots of people working with audio
for other reasons... field recordings, voice recordings (podcasts etc), signal
analysis, etc. Maybe Sawtooth becomes more optimized for one of those other
cases.

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puranjay
As an amateur producer, I'm wondering: what's the utility of something like
this?

If I create a new set, I have the option to use the 'Synth'.

Let's be very honest here: if I want to make real music, I'm going to turn to
a serious DAW + synth plugin. I personally use both Massive and Serum with
Ableton. Anything you cook up in a webapp is going to fall seriously,
_seriously_ short of what Serum can do.

Not to mention that a web tool just doesn't fit into the workflow. The synth
is the heart of digital music production. If I'm making music in Ableton, I
want my synth to be inside Ableton.

This might interest absolute amateurs, but amateurs won't pay for this, and by
the time they are advanced enough to _want_ to pay, they would have discovered
Ableton/Logic/FLStudio.

I don't mean any offense, but I find that online music tools like this are
generally very poorly thought. They are a solution searching for a problem
instead of the other way around.

A lot of people need simple tweaks to their photos or graphics. This is why
online photo editing tools work even though they fall far short of Photoshop
in capabilities.

But audio/music? This isn't something your average Joe needs for his Instagram
profile or his Facebook business page. If someone is serious about music/audio
editing, he will eventually want to use a professional tool.

Not to mention that Ableton Lite is quite decent for someone new to music
production

~~~
myzie
Sawtooth creator here...

Thanks for the feedback and I agree with a lot of what you said. You're right
that this can't compete with pro audio software but it's also not my goal to
compete with those tools.

I'm putting Sawtooth out there to evaluate if there is demand for this type of
web app, and what groups may be the most interested. Whether anyone will pay
for it... great question! I'm not worried about that just yet.

Web apps have a lot of limitations compared to native desktop apps when it
comes to serious audio work. At the same time, I wonder how many people could
use a reliable web app for super quick edits, to listen to some of their audio
while on the go (not just at an audio workstation), or share tracks privately
with bandmates or coworkers. We'll see.

~~~
eeZah7Ux
Thanks for your project.

The sharing aspect is the interesting bit. Having a "github for sound
samples", with the ability track forks and have commit history could be
wonderful.

Implementing a professional DAW or synth takes a staggering amount of work.
The toy synth might confuse users about the purpose of sawtooth. (Personally,
I would remove it)

~~~
puranjay
See: Splice.com. It works like GitHub and is already very popular with
producers.

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microcolonel
I think the marketing page could do with some demos. There are online DAWs
already and most of them are pretty sad. If you showcase some real audio work
accomplished with Sawtooth, it'll be more worth signing up to try.

I have DAW software already, I use Ardour and Pure Data on my computer, so I
want to know that I can do something compelling with your tool before
bothering to set up an account.

~~~
myzie
I appreciate the feedback. A couple aspects of Sawtooth that might be
compelling for you, as a supplement to what you're already using -

1\. Share sets of recordings privately with any collaborators. All protected
by logins. This feature is basic right now (it's read-only if you are not the
owner) but could be expanded.

2\. The convenience factor of accessing your most used audio clips or
recordings from anywhere, on most any device. Maybe your final Ardour mixes
you would upload to have easier access when you're not at your workstation,
for example.

I know this isn't for everyone, and it's certainly not intended as a
replacement for desktop pro audio software. Rather, it may be a complimentary
tool for some for simple editing tasks, quickly streaming your recordings
while on the go, or collaborating with others on shared sound files.

~~~
microcolonel
Seems cool, good job. I look forward to seeing more of your platform.

DAW plugins are usually pretty hard to write and maintain, but maybe it'd be
cool to have a "send selected tracks to sawtooth and share" type flow.

------
jvanegmond
I've very long wanted something like this! Basically like a CyberChef (
[https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/](https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/) ) but
for audio. I work in digital speech processing and often work with audio
codecs and it would be very helpful to have an online tool which lets you
apply multiple filters to some audio.

What I'm missing after trying out Sawtooth is the interactivity of CyberChef.
Basically trying out a few filters, one after the other, showing the
intermediate results for each, and some frequency analysis on it, and hearing
the results. Can audio filters be applied in the browser for instant-feedback
to hear the audio 'live' (like CyberChef auto-bake) like it can be with text?

And some conversions would be really great as well, like being able to apply
various encodings: Treating the samples as a-law encoded and applying an a-law
decoding pass on it.

~~~
myzie
I was wondering if anyone would be interested in having some signal analysis
available. It would be a logical step from what's there now.

At the moment all filtering is done in the backend. Hearing instant-feedback
though seems to be a common request so I'll have to give it some thought.

Sawtooth does keep all versions around and available (to support undo) so
improving the ability to quickly play the different versions of the same file
would be the easiest addition.

Thanks for giving it a try.

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jasonkostempski
Did you ever have a desktop app? In the early 2000's I used a program I
thought was called Sawtooth, or maybe it was just SAW, 'saw' was in the name,
but I can't for the life of me find it anywhere. You could draw a wave form
with the mouse, name it, piano roll it, sequence it into a song and export as
a wave and that was about it. I know that sounds like ever DAW on the planet
but it didn't have any advanced features and I think drawing the wave form was
unique to it at the time. If anyone knows what I'm talking about please let me
know.

~~~
jasonkostempski
2 days of really hard thinking I finally remembered. "SawCutter". Seems to be
abandoned though. cuttermusic.com is something else now and the download.com
link is, of course, completely shady. Hope I can find it on an old backup CD
somewhere.

Edit: Looks like this might be the author who seems to have a pretty
impressive resume:
[http://www.larryzitnick.org/](http://www.larryzitnick.org/)

------
gargarplex
I do a bit of online video production (for social media marketing and for
online courses) and I have to open up audacity every once in a while. I don't
like the audacity user experience. Here's my feature request list

1) Make it easy to switch audio formats ([mp3|wav|au|etc]->[mp3|wav|au|etc])

2) One button to make it louder, one button to make it quieter

3) A good cut and paste interface with the ability to zoom in and out and see
the spectrogram so one may be sure that one starts cutting at the audio part
(if there is white noise)

4) Abilities to selectively remove deep or high voices and remove background
noise

~~~
myzie
Thanks for the list!

~~~
gargarplex
You're welcome. I know how challenging it can be to launch a new product and
all you want is information from the market regarding where to go.

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Optimal_Persona
Interesting. In "Works With Multiple Formats" section, it mentions 'AU' \- do
you mean AIFF (AU is Apple's Audio Unit plugin format)? 'Chorus' is misspelled
under "Filters".

What is bitrate/quality of transcoding, and how would you rate your DSP
algorithms compared to those in pro DAWs/editors? Like, is that FreeVerb or
something fancier, and what about pitchshift/timestretch quality and zero-
delay filters? Audio folks are pretty picky about quality these days.

~~~
myzie
In supported browsers I'm using the Opus codec which in general is quite good
quality compared to MP3. It falls back to MP3 in browsers that don't support
Opus... Safari and IE I think.

I believe it's using the default encoding settings for Opus and MP3 at the
moment (using opusenc and... maybe lame for MP3 I forget). Certainly I'm
looking to have great streaming quality so I should confirm that those
defaults are reasonable.

I'm using various open source and custom tools for the processing. YMMV. In
general they should be solid, but not as fancy as many of the latest VST
plugins. This could all evolve depending on feedback and what people are
interested in. One thing I considered as an addition is the ability to define
custom filters on the webpage... either interpreted or compiled in the backend
to edit your files. I think that would be a neat way to experiment with
filters, but would have some limitations as well.

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tommynicholas
I like this idea - but why do you let people edit the .wav part of the
extension? That was super counterintuitive to me could I have done .mp3 for
example?

I'll leave any other feedback I have here unless you have an email I can send
it to - I've been looking for a good web version of Hum (the mobile app) and
this looks like it could be it + more!

~~~
myzie
Hey there, thanks for trying it out. Was this after uploading a wav then
clicking to edit its tags or file name? I'll see if I can improve that aspect.
In general, Sawtooth transcodes uploads behind the scenes to create mp3 and
opus encoded versions so that they can be streamed to your browser (not all
browsers support playing wav directly). These versions are all stored next to
each other. Editing the name string in the UI shouldn't be able to change file
extensions in the backend.

I'd be happy to field any other questions here or equally you can reach me at
curtis at sawtooth.io

------
mjmj
Seems like a great start. I too would like to see ways to combine waveforms.
And a bigger ask of being able to draw filters in real time while playing back
to hear changes instead having to process them to find out what will happen as
well as loop the same while editing. I realizing I'm asking for more DAW like
features! :P

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sevilo
Seems like a really cool project with potential. Would like to see the ability
to preview on filters and synths, that seems like a big downside compared to
the desktop DAWs.

Also not sure if there's a place to report bugs and provide feedback in the
future?

~~~
myzie
Thanks, please send any feedback to curtis at sawtooth.io

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redmand
I was playing with it for a bit and came across a few issues, but can't seem
to find a support or contact link. Where would you like such information sent?

~~~
myzie
Please shoot me an email with your findings: curtis at sawtooth.io

Thank you!

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acuozzo
It would be worthwhile to mention if multichannel audio is supported or if the
application is limited to working with mono and stereo inputs.

~~~
myzie
Good point. Multi-channel is supported. I'll make a note to add it to the
feature list on the page.

------
myzie
FYI - you can use Google login if you visit the Sign In page (instead of Sign
Up). Need to make this more obvious.

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thecrumb
Click - sign up. ... No.

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thenormal
Can It be used for direct streeming?

