💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~valravn › log › 2024 › 0226.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 11:22:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I first started making beats when I was fifteen or sixteen. This was in 2016, near the height of the online lofi hiphop community, and just at the rise of the Soundcloud era. It was a great time to start messing around with FL Studio. There was a vibrant community sprouting around sharing sounds and techniques, and I spent hours at watching tutorials both at home and school.
I couldn't do much more than watch at school, though. We had been given extremely locked-down Chromebooks for our work. Don't get me wrong - It is absolutely fantastic that I was able to spend my schooldays with the internet at my fingertips, as filtered as it might have been. It is such a shame, though, to have an entire computer that can essentially only run Google Chrome. There was very little tinkering to be done, and no shot I could run any of my preferred audio workstations; only the few shitty music webapps I had become familiar with at the time.
One day, early in the schoolyear, I made a new friend - a fellow beatmaker, and one way more experienced than I was. I had seen him creating with some sort of workstation in the browser, and it actually looked pretty nice. This was my introduction to audiotool[1], and it's stayed with me for years now.
audiotool back then was flash-based, and impressive for what it was. Synthesizers, drum machines, and effects are used via drag-and-dropping them into a sandbox, where you can program and wire them together in different configurations. It's something like a virtual modular synthesizer in this way. Additionally, there is a more conventional playlist view that lets you sequence your music, fine-tune parameters, and automate pretty much anything. It's by far the most impressive browser-based DAW I've used, especially after its more recent HTMl5 rewrite.
Aside from the application itself, audiotool also hosted its own community. Music could be posted publically onto your profile for people to listen to and comment on. There's a forum that, at the time, was pretty active. Artists could leave their music open for remixing, which allowed others to directly open their project files and play around. It was really a great place to interact with other producers and improve. Some of my favorite producers to this day have libraries worth of music on audiotool, most of it hosted exclusively on the website, and so much of it is so wonderful that I still return to audiotool just to listen in.
A lot of time has passed now. I'm older, understand the internet and the world just a little bit more, and I've learned how these things tend to go. audiotool is free, with a few supporters on Patreon, and no visible business model. I do not think it is sustainable at its size. Enshittification encroaches, and audiotool will either have to set paywalls and restrictions to further grow, or it's probably doomed to shut down in some time. I've been inspired by my doomsaying archivist peers - for once, I can see the writing on the wall, and I'm trying to prepare.
I'm putting together my first project in Go - atscraper[2], a simple tool for downloading audiotool tracks from a list of urls. It is in no way elegant, nor very scaleable. Scraping every mp3 off of audiotool is not my personal goal, nor would I like to deal with any potential repercussions for building a tool to do so. I'm focused on creating a personal archive of my favorite artists' work. Frankly, it would've been better to write as a shell script, but I want to get used to actual programming languages. It's not quite ready for other people to use yet, but I'm planning to polish it up.
Here's a handful of my favorite tracks on audiotool, if you're interested.
Few people can do so much with so little as Yang. This is a top-tier representation of the lofi trap beats I fell in love with.
Audiotool really shined with allowing people to share these short snippets - whether they were a quick burst of creativity, or a focused effort at a precise sound. This trippy atmosphere grounded by a pulsing 808 feels like both.
Artists like dove and leer always deeply inspire me with how masterful their synthwork is, while still having such creative rhythms. As someone whose talents lean toward the rhythmic side of things, they're like masters of light and dark to me. leer does some great stuff with a brazilian funk beat here.
Lastly, another Yang track - a straight-up weird dance remix of September by Earth, Wind & Fire. It's fantastic.
Thanks for reading.