# music, audiotool, archives
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.
=>
https://audiotool.com [1] audiotool
=>
https://git.sr.ht/~valravn/atscraper [2] atscraper
Here's a handful of my favorite tracks on audiotool, if you're interested.
=>
https://www.audiotool.com/track/vo09dim0l9s/ Yang. - Alkhmy.
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.
=>
https://www.audiotool.com/track/nxidimlgt/ dove - untitled beat 1/30/19
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.
=>
https://www.audiotool.com/track/e41yc0rmc/ leer! - open heart
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.
=>
https://www.audiotool.com/track/september_yangmix/ Yang. - September (yangmix)
Lastly, another Yang track - a straight-up weird dance remix of September by Earth,
Wind & Fire. It's fantastic.
Thanks for reading.
