Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Sonatino – small audio dev board based on ESP32-S3
Hi! My name is Ben, and I recently updated my audio dev board "Sonatino" after receiving a lot of good feedback from the initial launch a year ago. I began working on this after building a few projects that required audio capabilities. I was getting tired of wiring up external DACs and amplifiers to ESP32 boards, so I decided to look for a more compact, integrated solution. The available options either had larger footprints, non-standard connectors, or features that I didn't typically need for my projects. That's when I started working on a custom PCB that could be a sort of "audio swiss…
Sonatino is a compact audio development board built around the ESP32-S3 microcontroller that integrates a DAC and amplifier, eliminating the need to wire external audio components. Designed by Ben for makers building… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 2 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Sonatino – small audio dev board based on ESP32-S3 launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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As part of a little research and also some fun I decided to try my hand at seeing how small of an ESP32 board I can make with functioning WiFi.
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I’ve recently released my solo project Audiocube I wanted to make a 3D DAW, where spatial audio, physics, and virtual acoustics are all directly integrated into the engine. This makes it easy to create music in 3D, and experiment with new techniques which aren’t possible in traditional DAWs and plugins. I’d love to get any feedback on this software (Mac/Windows) to make it better. You can download it for free through the website. Thanks, Noah
2025 · audiocube.app · its alternatives →
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Custom soundboard creator
2025 · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →
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I made a tiny device for automatically recording digital pianosfrom $185/mo▲590Hey HN! A few years ago, I left my cushy big tech job to make hardware. And made the device I always wanted - an automatic piano recorder! I usually play piano improvisationally, and manually hitting record never meshed well with that. But there are always moments I wish I recorded, and now they are! Hopefully it scratches a similar itch for some of you as well! A few of the tech details: * built on an esp32-s3 * custom injection molded enclosure * BLE comms, sd card storage, DS1302 RTC * android & ios apps with Flutter * Shadertoy vfx support for video sharing - Chip
2024 · jamcorder.com · its alternatives →
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Sonura Studio▲131so i got sick of scrolling through sample libraries, buying plugins, and trying desperately to make original music and sound design with suno. built a DAW that's free to try for any music producers or content creators! you can generate individual stems, one shots and sfx standalone or in studio mode. you can also share and remix tracks instantly, something incredibly painful in the existing audio space. shoot me an email at [email protected] if you wanna come work on this with me :)
2025 · sonurastudio.com · its alternatives →
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3D printing is such a fascinating field of technology, so a couple months ago, I decided to take a deep dive and learn how they actually work! This took me to one of my very first PCB projects, a small, cheap, 3D printer motherboard. While it's not the most cutting edge board, I learned a lot and I fully documented my process designing it (https://github.com/KaiPereira/Cheetah-MX4-Mini/blob/master/J...), so other people can learn from my mistakes! It runs off of an STM32H743 MCU, has 4 TMC stepsticks with UART/SPI configurations,…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Haxophone▲526I built this during Covid. When I released it, some of the parts went out of stock or skyrocketed in price, no longer making this an economic DIY project. Now that things are getting back to almost normal, I thought I'd share it here and request feedback. This is a very niche project for people who like the same things I do: saxophones, Rust, mechanical keyboards and the Raspberry Pi.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I built a synthesizer based on 3D physicsfree tier, from $99/mo▲512I've been working on the Anukari 3D Physics Synthesizer for a little over two years now. It's one of the earliest virtual instruments to rely on the GPU for audio processing, which has been incredibly challenging and fun. In the end, predictably, the GUI for manipulating the 3D system actually ended up being a lot more work than the physics simulation. So far I am only selling it direct on my website, which seems to be working well. I hope to turn it into a sustainable business, and ideally I'd have enough revenue to hire folks to help with it. So far it's been 99% a solo project, with…
2025 · anukari.com · its alternatives →
- 10SA
Hey HN, My cofounder and I trained an AI music generation model and after a month of testing we're launching 1.0 today. Ours is interesting because it's a latent diffusion model instead of a language model, which makes it more controllable: https://sonauto.ai/ Others do music generation by training a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder like Descript Audio Codec (https://github.com/descriptinc/descript-audio-codec) to turn music into tokens, then training an LLM on those tokens. Instead, we ripped the tokenization part off and replaced it with a normal…
2024 · sonauto.ai · its alternatives →
- 11EZ
I've been playing around with ESP32 MCUs and displays for a while and finally got around to getting a ZX Spectrum emulator working. I then saw that you can now do full color silk screen printing on PCBs and got the thinking - the ESP32 has capacitive touch capabilities - I could make a full ZX Spectrum keyboard on a PCB along with all the electronics for running the emulator. And it actually works! There's a full video here: https://youtu.be/foP81O48WAI And you can sign up here for updates as I move towards getting it ready for a production run:…
2024 · its alternatives →
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Libre music sequencer for desktop and mobile platforms - helio-fm/helio-sequencer
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Sound Blocks▲163A lego inspired music making app for non-musicians & gamers
2024 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →
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Build great experiences for millions of Sonos speakers.
2018 · its alternatives →
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AudioBridge▲109Add AirPlay support to your Sonos speakers
2017 · audiobridge.site · its alternatives →
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A while back I wrote a CHIP-8 emulator (which is considered the Hello, World! of emulators and is more accurately a virtual machine since historically CHIP-8 was an interpreted language running on top of the COSMAC VIP to make game programming easier). But a few months ago I got really interested in embedded software, so decided it would be neat to port my emulator to a STM32 MCU and design a console around it as a learning experience, since CHIP-8 never existed as a physical system. I didn't know much about embedded software when I began, and even less about electronics, but I managed to…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18L1
2015 · libsound.io · its alternatives →
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SoundSource 3.0▲102The sound control that should be built into MacOS
2017 · rogueamoeba.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Free & Open-source iPhone/iPad Synth 🎹
2019 · audiokitpro.com · its alternatives →
- 22
A completely new professional soundboard app for iPhone/iPad
2016 · soundboardstudio.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Turns all your devices into a luxury stereo system
2018 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →
- 24
PewCB▲67Vibe-routing is coming. Desktop PCB Factory is here.
30d ago · pewcb.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →