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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Web-REPL "skred" : my OSS sound engine w/retro C64 appearance

I've been working on a C-based open source sound engine as part of a book project and wanted an approachable way for people to try it out without having to build anything. Through the magic of emscripten (which I'm totally amazed by) and miniaudio (which has given me new life late in my development career), and a smidge of vibe-coded HTML/JS (web-dev is not my jam), this page will let you try out the tooling. I gave a lightning talk on the ASCII notation at ElixirConf EU last month here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnJ0osgiqWM There's a work-in-progress tutorial for…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1IU

    Hi Hacker News, This is definitely out of my comfort zone. I just wanted to show you guys because I'm super proud of it. It's a 100% faithful recreation based off of the schematics, patents, and ROMs that were found online. So please watch the video and tell me what you think https://youtu.be/auOlZXI1VxA The reason why I think this is relevant is because I've been a programmer for 25 years and AI scares the shit out of me. I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for…

    Jan 2026 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    This is my noisy and ugly baby... but I love it...

    Jul 2026 · octetta.github.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I built k-synth as an experiment to see if a minimalist, K-inspired array language could make sketching waveforms faster and more intuitive than traditional code. I’ve put together a web-based toolkit so you can try the syntax directly in the browser without having to touch a compiler: Live Toolkit: https://octetta.github.io/k-synth/ If you visit the page, here is a quick path to an audio payoff: - Click "patches" and choose dm-bell.ks. - Click "run"—the notebook area will update. Click the waveform to hear the result. - Click the "->0" button below the waveform to copy…

    Mar 2026 · octetta.github.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    8-Bit retro sound fx generator

    Dec 2025 · pro.sfxr.me · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    An HTML version of a Roland TR-909

    2015 · its alternatives →

  6. 6MP

    I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…

    2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org · its alternatives →

  7. 7WA

    Hi, I'm the author of this little Web Audio toy which does physical modeling synthesis using a simple spring-mass system. My current area of research is in sparse, event-based encodings of musical audio (https://blog.cochlea.xyz/sparse-interpretable-audio-codec-pa...). I'm very interested in decomposing audio signals into a description of the "system" (e.g., room, instrument, vocal tract, etc.) and a sparse "control signal" which describes how and when energy is injected into that system. This toy was a great way to start learning about physical modeling synthesis, which seems…

    2025 · blog.cochlea.xyz · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    This is part of my journey on pybind11. I wrote a tiny FM Synthesis library in C++ and a Python wrapper for that using pybind11. There is a command-line piano app in the examples directory if you want to play with it. Here is the link: https://github.com/charstorm/koelsynth/tree/main/examples/si... My next target is to attach this to some kind of physics simulation - like a bunch of balls moving around in a box with some internal walls. When the ball hits certain trigger points, it produces the sound.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9IM

    just a wack systems dude tbh

    2018 · h313.info · its alternatives →

  10. 10IB

    Hey HN, I’m an ex-Google engineer trying to get back into music production. I needed a way to sequence my hardware synths using AI contexts without constantly switching windows, so I built this. It runs entirely in the browser using WebMIDI. No login required. It connects to your local MIDI devices (if you're on Chrome/Edge) and lets you generate patterns. Tech stack: [React / WebMIDI API / etc]. Link: www.simplychris.ai/droplets Code is a bit messy, but it works. Feedback welcome.

    Dec 2025 · simplychris.ai · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    So, I've never written a line of Rust in my life. I wouldn't know an `&mut this` from a mutandis. But I saw a tweet about a month ago that said, in this new era of AI, you'd be able to just take a library that you love, throw a TUI around it, and call it an app. So I spent about 200 bucks last month, here's what I came up with: Imbolc is a DAW that runs entirely in your terminal. It talks to scsynth over OSC and ships 58 instruments and 39 effects. VSTs are a work in progress, also GarageBand loops if you want to recreate "Umbrella". The codebase is about 60k? lines of Rust across 5 crates,…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Inspired by the recent Boards Of Canada announcement, I've been in a low-fi electronica mood lately and was going back and forth with Claude on how to design similar instruments in the browser that fit the genre. One thing led to another and pretty soon I had a fully browser based polyphonic synthesizer / drum machine / sequencer. The interface and workflow was heavily inspired by the Rebirth338 application released back in the 90's, but with lo-fi synth voices rather than the original 303 & 808 emulation. I know there's a significant overlap of developers and musicians and I…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey HN! Last week I was working on a website and needed a way to synchronise visuals with live music. I've used MIDI controllers for this before, but I am travelling right now and don't have mine with me. So I had the crazy idea to build a browser extension that uses the keyboard as input and includes a sequencer. I gave myself 24 to work on it. It ended up taking longer (of course), specially since I ended up creating a demo, a small landing, docs, and an intro video. Took me one week from idea to launch (pushed quite a bit tbh). Features: - Works as a browser extension. Atm distributed…

    2024 · minitap.io · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi - I'm part composer, part engineer and big fan of reading blogs where people learn out loud or with the garage door up by sharing their notebooks or journals. I've been doing this in Moleskines for years (going back to the 80s) but made it a new year's in 2024 resolution to post SOMETHING everyday, so long as I created the sound. I have a big archive of demos and seeds of ideas, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to do something with those in the process. Being so steeped in programming for the last 30 years, a healty chunk of this material is made via coding with Csound, TidalCycles, some raw…

    2025 · listenfaster.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15AA

    Hey y'all, So - the main idea of this is to make a WebAudio synthesis/sequencer tool which humans can use via the UI, but where the big unlock is for agents to drive with MCP It's semi decent as "make a groovy jazz track", especially for retro sounds - but the real use case is more like "make a jetpack whoosh effect I can control via code at runtime - where the sound changes based on character health or how much fuel is left" In other words, the target audience is not musicians (except maybe of the Max/MSP sort), but more like creative coders who want to shape the sound iteratively…

    Jun 2026 · audio.awsm.fun · its alternatives →

  16. 16TS

    I've built To_Shout, a lightweight output library for bare-metal environments that requires no standard library, no OS dependencies, and no headers. It's designed for kernel development, embedded systems, and anyone working close to the metal. Key features: · Type-aware output using C11 _Generic · Supports integers, floats, strings, hex, and binary formats · VGA text mode implementation included · Color output support · Less than 300 lines of code · LGPL 3.0 licensed GitHub: https://github.com/Ferki-git-creator/to_shout

    2025 · its alternatives →

  17. 17IM

    Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.

    Jul 2026 · its alternatives →

  18. 18
  19. 19IB

    Hey HN, I built a website where you can train Llama 3.1 8b & 70b (4bit) on your data. I use unsloth in the backend and the training is done on H100s which I rent programmatically from Runpod. I'd love some feedback. If you would be interested in using it feel free to book a chat with me: cal.com/hamada/tunellama-intro Happy to give you free credits :) P.S. I'm also looking for a co-founder as I have big plans for this.

    2024 · tunellama.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    If you clicked because of the title, congratulations. It's indeed not fake - I genuinely didn't use any third-party libraries, everything is built using Web APIs and Rust's built-in libraries. Regarding how this project came about - I got quite angry when a browser new tab extension I frequently used got poisoned/had a backdoor implanted. Thus this project was born. As there are still some issues currently, everyone is welcome to provide suggestions and report bugs. It's been open source on Github for a while now - if anyone's interested, feel free to check it out. Thank you all, and…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22IJ

    Hey all. For the last few years, I have been developing a software synthesizer as a side project. It's taken longer than I both hoped and feared, but earlier this week I finally shipped 1.0. Details about the synth itself are up on my website, https://lhiaudio.com/. For those who are unfamiliar, in music production, there are host applications (such as Logic Pro, Ableton Live, or REAPER) in which most of the work (such as recording or sequencing MIDI data) is done. These applications generally have some built-in tools for the actual generation and processing of audio data, but…

    2018 · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    As a side project for a hockey manager game, I created a small audio tracker, "HM Tracker," which was used to make the game's music. It is a browser-based tracker-style music workstation. All sound is procedurally generated from oscillators - no samples, no plugins. The UI lets you edit patterns on a step grid, pick instruments and chords, then export as a standalone JS music engine or WAV file. Built with vanilla JS and the Web Audio API (best experienced on a desktop browser). Made in the '90s demoscene spirit (at least the looks, anyway). Would love any feedback!

    Mar 2026 · manager.kiekko.pro · its alternatives →

  24. 24KP

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