Sound Printer

The shape of it

Eight mono tracks. You record one at a time, and that is deliberate rather than a limitation waiting to be lifted — Chrome hard-codes the microphone channel cap at two, so simultaneous multi-track recording is permanently out on the web. Working one take at a time turns out to suit the kind of record this is for.

There are no plugin menus and no parameter trees. Every track has the same chain in the same order, with few knobs and sensible defaults, and the only real decisions are musical ones.

Per track

fixed order

1. High and low pass

   Both ends of the band in one module. The low pass rests fully open, so switching the module on changes nothing until you move a knob — and a project saved before it existed sounds exactly as it did.

2. Three-band EQ

   Fixed low, mid and high frequencies with a modest cut and boost range. Enough to place a part, not enough to redesign it.

3. Compressor

   Three characters — Gentle, Punchy and Glue — each a fixed attack, release, ratio and knee. You set the amount and nothing else.

4. Saturation

   Optional, three characters. Off by default.

Delay and reverb are shared send buses rather than per-track inserts, so a record keeps one space instead of eight.

Mastering

Mastering is a discrete step you choose to take, not an always-on setting quietly shaping everything. Open Create Master and pick a character from a two-by-two grid: Bold or Soft for energy and punch, Vintage or Modern for tone.

Each quadrant bundles a fixed EQ curve, compression and limiting behaviour, and saturation amount, tuned as a sound rather than exposed as sliders. Preview against the current mix, switch quadrants freely to compare, then create. The finished stereo master is the app's primary deliverable — the song as one file — and it travels inside the saved project.

Under it

The compressor is a custom AudioWorklet, not the browser's built-in node. That node's knee shape and lookahead are implementation details rather than spec, so identical settings can sound different in different browsers. The worklet is explicit maths, which means the preset numbers describe real behaviour.

Loudness is real ITU-R BS.1770. The K-weighting coefficients are derived at the session sample rate and match the published 48k reference to eleven decimal places.

Live and offline paths share the same graph builders, so what you export is what you heard.

Specifications