Couldn't the entirety of Audiotool be put into two free downloads, one of them consisting of an equivalent to the Audiotool app, and the other consisting of an equivalent to the site, on which all tracks would be published, all user pages would be placed, and all comments would be posted? Not having to work with a browser's limitations could help in further improving the user experience. Audiotool could be like a more ergonomic, community-oriented version of the Steam app, but for music instead of videogame-related stuff.
Comments (4)
First off: yes, that's probably possible and afaik we never excluded that option.
Can't speak for all other devs but I will share my own view on this: AT currently runs on all systems having a decent browser. This includes: MacOS, Windows, Linux (with several windowsing systems), BSD, ChromeOS. If we switch to a native app we'd have to provide a build for every platform.
AT doesn't need an installation. You can just log-in on your school's pc on a friend's pc or even at work.
Even if we offer a desktop application we want to continue to support browsers. This implies that we cannot add any feature to the studio which doesn't run in the browser as well.
Another problem are updates: if we change something on our servers your browser client will be updated automatically. How shall that be achieved on native platforms? Pushing an update into an app store takes time (maybe several days). Users with different versions would not be able to collab.
It's just not that easy.
Been thinking about this aswell, that's exactly the thing I like about it! Sure, it gives you limitations, but in my opinion it would basically cause more problems than it would probably solve.
@zhomas First of all: what kind of limitations are you referring to that audiotool in the browser brings you?
I mean, having local installations (apart from all the other points @chordofdestruction already mentioned the next request would be to enable VST-plugins when running local. That in turn, I guess, would cause lots of problems for collaborating on tracks as there would have to be a need for a vst-synch between hosts which is highly problematic.
Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to be do-or-die but that's a really interesting point in general and the compatibility for the DAW in the browser is a huge thing as it solves so many problems you would otherwise face - given the fact you would want to access on more than your local machine where you got it all set up. By using the browser as the infrastructure (and interface) pretty much everybody with internet access has you got a lot more options which I think is really great.
But I'm really interested in how you feel limited working in a browser!
audiotool2.com has app only and it has only songs from that site the app automatically updates regularly.
The only thing that sets Audiotool apart from any other programs is:
A.) It runs on all computers in a browser
B.) You can collaborate with other users real time.
C.) Everything is centralized on the site and servers.
There's pretty much no reason to develop a desktop application. Audiotool has it's niche.