To me, audiotool is a program made to make music accessible to new, upcoming, and less financially fortunate musicians. I've used the software on and off since I was 15 years old (I'm 25 now), and the fact that I've been able to stick with it for as long as I have is something really special to me. I've learned synthesis, mixing, mastering, and much more through making my music with this software, and working within its limitations. I've prided myself in knowing almost everything about this DAW, whether I used every feature or not, and mostly being content with using those same tools for almost all of my music.
So why is it that the proposition of VST support, and stem uploads feels like a step back in my mind? Maybe I'm a purist, maybe I'm incredibly jaded, or maybe I'm too far disassociated from the website at this point to understand the greater picture. I wanna ask you guys this same question, and see if I'm alone in this mentality.
Please keep discussion civil, and polite when making your responses, otherwise I'll probably delete your comments.
Comments (37)
for a long time audiotool for me was the one and only good social platform to meet and collaborate with musicians. when big artist like xavi, looks, opaqity, clu started fading out i never truly understood why because the community was great, they proved the daw was capable and easy to use, audiotool was at the peak at the time i think, personally.
i guess i finally opened my eye to everything over the past recent events and realised the state of audiotool in general is just in shambles in my opinion. the user interface isn't even that bad and the daw is very capable of making good music but one of the big reasons why i'm still here is because i felt like this community was valuable but after stepping out onto other communities. i realise this community is not valuable at all. or at the very least it is a shell of what it once was.
regarding the innovation of audiotool, i was in cologne when they unveiled a bunch of new exciting features. i was super duper excited. but then i had time to think over the months after that. "hold on, where did this team come from?", "oh, they got an investment", "oh, there is an official announcement for subscription plans", "oh they said it was going to take a few years to complete this, now it's coming out this year.. ok" a lot of things just do not make sense to me and i do not like the direction that audiotool is heading anymore. audiotool has lost its sense of being a platform for musicians and now its seemingly turned into a business.
i honestly do not mind audiotool doing their subscription services, the investment, the stems allowed on audiotool. its their company. it's just, what is the long-term plan for this? i estimate about 80% of audiotool users do not want to pay or cannot pay for a subscription service. how will the investment be paid off? apparently putting audiotool into the education system for money was cancelled for some reason. it makes no sense. a lot of short-term decisions are being made and seemingly without any thought. at least from my perspective.
regarding the situation with the old co-founder of audiotool, it makes me uncomfortable to use the DAW anymore or tell people about it since such lengthy allegations do not just come out of the blue. i have made up my mind, however one-sided this decision may be but my trust is in them after a while of being on the fence about everything.
about stems and vst support. i don't mind and it's actually quite welcome but it feels like yet another decision that had no thought put into it. if this was announced back when audiotool was still booming a few years ago this would've been an outrage i think if it was handled exactly the same way; out of the blue and without considering the users of the site. i have to admit, though; allowing stem upload has kind of killed my desire at all to open the DAW anymore but it is a huge variety of reasons as to why i don't want to make music on audiotool anymore. this just seemed to be the killing blow and yet i kind of asked for it kind of in a previous thread. my main goal was just to clear up how the community thinks about other works being included within audiotool and it seems nobody cares or is too afraid to speak out. i don't know. good for audiotool and the community that this is now guilt-free and i hope it blossoms from it. i just can't understand fully why i hate this. i think it is just how it was handled, i guess? maybe i am over reacting? maybe i am out of touch and disassociated from the website just like you?
the new direction of audiotool:
it seems gaming themed competitions are going to be more frequent. as an artist who just wants to make beautiful and expressive art, i have no interest in this. let's compare these prize based competitions to the audiotool day competitions. i would always religiously do the audiotool day competition even though i know i will not place in the top 3 and there will be so many artists competing. the event is about audiotool, the community. everyone brings their A game and we can all hear it. the other competitions can sometimes be fun but there is not much sense of community behind it. what is dreamhack? who is spitfire labs? why do we care about league of legends and cs:go? what does this have to do with audiotool? what does this have to do with music and expression? the dreamhack thing kind of worked since it felt like a nice little event to bring people together and create whatever with some prompt. however it was extremely awkward to take part in because you had to do it on a specific day, specific time and whatever. what does that have to do with the art process? the process of creating art should not be touched at all.
with the new competition we were given a week for each contest which is insane. they've changed this to August 20th for all the contests a few days ago but let me reiterate the bigger problem here. it's the lack of thought and short term decisions which is just killing my respect for audiotool.
the other new directions of audiotool...
since audiotool has taken an investment, realise that this money is just a loan and has to be paid back eventually. this is why subscriptions are going to be in place, this is why these competitions are happening, this is why audiotool used to be given to schools. i suspect things are only going to get more and more dire because i have personally lost faith in the leadership of audiotool.
leading such a platform such as audiotool with low capital potential is extremely difficult and so i give merit to those who have already taken it this far. but audiotool to me is like an unwatered plant which is only just now recieving water but it's already too late. the community has died off because of lack of action and such. i think as well the biggest killer was the website redesign. while it is much more modern, it fails to connect people and discover other artists and music. what happened to audiotool radio? why do i need to scroll down my giant notification feed to see the charts? why do i need to log out to see the top 1 of all categories all in one place? all of this stuff should be easily accessible. people complain about the moderation team being bad, why not open some slots? like an unwatered plant as i've said.
my point is, all of these gaming competitions should've been done a very long time ago but even then. it should still not be the main focus. again: what does any of this have to do with music or art? ask any musician why they make art. i personally have no interest in winning prizes or making music for other people. i'm here to have fun and express myself. how does winning a prize help me express myself?
i was on the fence about quitting audiotool since it has been such a great journey and i'd hate to end it here but i guess it's honestly time to move on. what is there left to stay for? the community is a shell. the people behind audiotool have commited fraud against andre in my opinon. audiotool is not acting in the best interests of the users and the DAW UX is a little outdated but the new version will be paywalled under a subscription service. i cannot own audiotool, i cannot use it offline. there is not a single reason left to stay here anymore.
perhaps this will be my "Moving to FL" rant, i just hope it made sense and audiotool can learn from it. i've already established a footing on bitwig and for the community aspect i've moved onto other discord servers where people make music with all sorts of tools. it's much more friendly and people are actually interested in listening to your art.
i have never imagined this in a million years that i would say this, but goodbye audiotool. it was a nice journey but it's time for me to move onto more active and less dysfunctional communities and start using more innovative tools.
to tl;dr and to answer the question of "What is audiotool to you?" as of the present. it is nothing anymore. there is nothing of value here anymore
Honestly for me I have no idea anymore. It really is the place where i'm most comfortable at my craft but the community is extremely jaded to me and what not. Besides that i only wanted to come back to really reconnect with some people and really that goal has been accomplished. To me audiotool has fallen so far from where it was and how people were back in 2017 when i started. I saw seeds of some people just degrading their talent and just in such a denial back then it's gotten so bad. It's just so stupid now these days with people who just don't try, or really care to make anything "worth while". Almost everyone at the top are so full of themselves and just have so many "underlings" it's not worth sticking around. The studio i love it's what i grew up on but it hasn't had anything new since 2020. So it's gotten really stale, old, repetitive. It's not worth sticking around for me because this place is really vile and unforgiving.
Audiotool to me is potential. Looking at the state of the community as well as other things, it's definitely not being realized in the best way right now, but there's still stuff to be optimistic about
AudioTool to me is a site where I can learn about music and connect with other people.
For me, Audiotool is a new planet, and I love exploring all these valleys... There are sometimes wonderful discoveries, but also cold austere corners without any charm. So, isn't beauty the twin sister of ugliness?
Beyond this conquest, this site allows us to travel, to meet, to share, to criticize, to exchange.... in short, to accomplish what our modern societies no longer seem able to provide us.
I treat myself to incredible trips while staying in front of my computer.
I love the spirit of this community, I love the ability of users to always push the limits, to create from tiny bricks, tracks that are so well constructed and professional.
only way to make music personally.
my laptop sucks as hell and my fkin ex went away whit the mac we bought together. B**ch.
I kept the car tho 💪
🚗
I suppose one reason I've been so disconnected is the silence, and the stasis that Audiotool is in at the moment. It's fun to watch something grow, and develop while you're interacting with it, but if what you're playing with never changes, never grows, never flourishes, no matter how deep or varied it can be, it will become boring eventually. That can vary for a lot of people, and I've more than passed my limit, I think.
It was my entry into music production overall. It's such a great gateway to working with sound. One has to think a lot about it's limitations and how to exploit them to get interesting sounds. The remixes, collaborative aspect, the fact that it's free and browser based is such an amazing tool to introduce all these important concepts of music. To this day, I believe that the educational potential of this DAW is underappreciated and not used enough.
It's also community and friendship to me. I've built connections with people who think on the same wavelength as me, have the same interests, the same struggles, are open, incredibly accepting and helpful for me. And yet the community is a sharp double edged sword.
Even though the stem and vst part of AT leaves me a bit disgruntled, I think it could open a whole new world of opportunities. Though my distrust in stems remains. So much more sampled music here nowadays. Often don't know where they come from and I often feel disappointed when I see that a synth has been made outside of AT. The more this happens, the more it could portrait the image of AT being inferior, which imo could lead to an even more rapid downfall of the site.
for me was my very first actual DAW, I was switching between fl studio and audiotool until i stopped using it. recently i started to use audiotool again now that i learned how to create my sounds and i'm working on my 10 year old drafts
my first DAW, but now a dead husk of a DAW that refuses to grow up
We grew up, but audiotool hasn't in the past 4 years
to me, audiotool is:
music software doo doo doo doodoo doooo
a community (not doo doo doo; inapplicable)
a fountain of ideas
a uh
uhhhh
i ran out of things to say
OH
its a piece of online history that has many features and quirks (and crippling limitations that make me wanna cry) that professional producers could learn from nowadays
my life
the reason why I'm still alive 😌
Cringe
HAHAA
It is cringe 🥹.
What Odsen said is cringe.
not cringe
when i wrote this, i actually did not enjoy using the audiotool daw that much but somehow the past month i've learnt to love the daw again for it's simplicity and quirks. but man. a year later i still stand by everything i've said. the situation of audiotool is still looking incredibly bleak and i can't bring myself to let go still.
is audiotool run by massively incompetent people or are they doing this on purpose? even a toddler could predict the negative reactions from their decisions.
my second daw (if you count soundtrap). as a chromebook kid, and as someone who recently became a teen AND just discovered audiotool a few weeks ago, i was shocked to find an entire community and a generation that grew up here (literally from when i wasnt even born to when i was an infant / toddler that AT seems like it had reached its peak back then)
despite seeing a lot of comments and everything thats been going on in general, ill probably be here for a while just making music (i wont be engaging too much, however, if the site is "dead" and more toxic than how it apparently used to be).
however, i do feel quite selfish for being here mainly as im too broke to afford a "professional" daw nor do i want to eat up my parents' computer storage / ram with production software. maybe ill stick around to see what happens to AT in the years to come
i also take back what i said about not engaging, ill still try to be active in the community as well if people even want me to :p
love it nogurt
to me it's about being able to produce what you enjoy but music should be sang for God not for the pride of others
Audiotool for me, is a lot of things. It's very close to my heart on a personal level for numerous reasons. This was my first real DAW, it's where I've built my music production experience from the ground up, and it's where I grew up. I joined AT as a middle schooler who was struggling to find himself, what he wanted to do, and just confused overall. I just kept making music and connecting with the community, growing my skill, learning what I could, and ultimately found myself in the process. Now I'm a senior and I know for a fact I want to continue making music as my career and my life.
In terms of software, Audiotool is amazing DAW that breeds creativity through it's limitations. Through the years my outlook on the studio went from "it's the most complex thing I've ever used" to "it's not enough and feels immature" to my current standpoint of "What can this thing do?" For a while, a few years after joining I felt that the limitations of the DAW deemed AT as a "building block DAW" and nothing more. A DAW that acts as a bit of a tutorial, a software that people can learn how to do music production then move on to bigger and better DAWs. And while I would LOVE to have and use a DAW such as FL Studio or Logic, I'm still content producing within AT. I'm learning so much even after five or six years, and I'm still not even using AT to it's full potential.
The community will change and fluctuate. That's just a fact of any social platform. Many people will join, some will be well known and build a legacy, and some will leave. No one will stay on the site forever, and we can't expect the community as a whole to stay the same forever. Just in the five years I've been here I've seen a change in the community myself. The best thing we can do is to continue spreading positivity throughout the site, instead of doing nothing except reminiscing and criticizing the new "generations" so to speak
Overall Audiotool is a very important DAW, you just gotta look for it.
website for making annoying noises
website to give people the chance to create and publish music that they like without getting bad comments
lol
A place to make music for fun in my free time. I randomly found audiotool from the Chrome Web Store in middle school, so I've been messing with it since. I think audiotool was a Flash application back then when Adobe Flash was still supported.
Yes! it's a dang good thing for an outdated chromebook which I'm finding a use for other than AudioSauna... the poor thing can only run Audiotool and AudioSauna, which are the only two reasons why I even keep the thing going!
damn it i refreshed the page and lost my progress
audiotool to me, like many, was the first step towards falling in love with music production. from searching up "free daw" in grade six to still struggling to complete projects in my last year of university; my love for creating sounds all stemmed from this software and community.
this very community, i wager, is the main reason i kept on going even though i knew i was pumping out ass in my first couple years on the platform. it was very intimidating seeing the quality of music that was being pumped out when i first started out, but interacting with the community broke down a lot of that intimidation. im not active in the community anymore so im unsure how it is now, but back then there was loads of people trying out the software, experimenting with whatever a wavetable synthesizer was, and a ton of experienced people giving feedback on other's sounds (yes, that includes you, niko from the hit game OneShot). it was fun back then to comment on tracks, participate in compilations and competitions; make meme songs, and complain about how "the audiotool community is dying/not the same" (i swear this has been an "issue" since the dawn of time). you dont really get that with any standalone daw and music publishing website: just the ability to open, study, and remix other peoples tracks was monumental in learning how to create cool sounds.
nowadays, i've moved my music making off platform and i now use ableton (neeerrd). though i do love creating drafts in ableton and never publishing them, i do admit it does get lonely at times. having an audience for your music, no matter how small and no matter how ass your music is, certainly is one of the best things to have as a beginner producer: knowing that there are ears out there that critically judge your music and not just glance over it.
i am so glad to see that the platform is still thriving and evolving. in other news, HOLY MOLY this Gakki thing is NUTS!! dude, if we had this back then we wouldn't have to suffer through the chopped heisenberg piano presets (whoever you may be, your efforts are appreciated and valuable). genuinely one of the biggest and best things to happen to audiotool since i joined lol :}
i really could not recommend a better daw to start off on. music is something to be shared, to be experimented with; to learn, grow, and thrive in. music is a language that is universally known and conveys feeling and meaning deeper than words could ever do. audiotool is something that facilitates exactly this while remaining largely accessible.
wishing the best for audiotool and it's community. thank you for years of fostering musical growth. spread kindness, yo.
(holy yap)
This has to be my favorite post on this. Put how I feel about the community into words I wasn't able to express myself. The community is just so, so powerful and important to people on the site, regardless of experience level. It's what makes Audiotool Audiotool and sets it apart from other DAWs.