CB Sounddesign has introduced a collection of 32 audio and MIDI tools that run entirely in a web browser, allowing users to build a sampled instrument or play their hardware synth in a browser tab.
Drop a folder of samples on one and get back a finished, playable instrument. Open another and it sends MIDI to the synth on your desk. All 32 are free, with no account and no trial period, and no audio ever leaves the machine it was opened on.
Much of the collection started in one person’s studio. Christian Bartrow, a sound designer and TV post-production producer who has worked in audio for more than 14 years, wrote many of the tools as Python scripts for his own sessions, then rebuilt them for the browser so they could be shared. Others, including the generative sequencers, were made for the site from the start.
Sampling, without the XML
Eight of the tools form a workbench for DecentSampler, the free sampler plugin. Between them they take a folder of recordings all the way to a finished instrument: mapping the samples by reading pitch, velocity layers and round robins out of the filenames, laying out the front panel visually, generating the knob and slider graphics, checking the mapping for gaps, and comparing two presets to see what changed.
CB DS UI Editor
The format is XML, and building an instrument by hand means writing it. These tools mean not writing it — in a browser tab, on any machine, with the samples staying on the user’s own drive.
Sequencers that talk to real hardware
Ten generative sequencers send MIDI straight out of the browser to hardware synths or to a DAW, using the Web MIDI API. They are driven by cellular automata, flow fields, a slime-mould simulation, pendulum curves, physics and layered geological data — patterns that come from somewhere other than a grid and a mouse.
A game that plays your synth.
One of them is a game. CB Ricochet is the classic brick-breaking arcade game, rebuilt as a sequencer: every brick the ball knocks out sends a note from a chosen scale, and the paddle, walls and ceiling play the drums — out to whatever is connected, a hardware synth, a drum machine, a DAW.
Left on autopilot, the paddle mis-hits and misses on its own, and the pattern grows out of that. Take the paddle with the mouse and whoever is playing the game is playing the track. It works as a game on its own, too: with nothing connected and the sound off, it is still hard to put down.
Alongside the sequencers are synthesizers that make sound in the browser, including a dual-oscillator synth and a generative ambient engine that renders directly to WAV.
The unglamorous half
The rest is the work nobody writes about: capturing impulse responses from hardware by sine-sweep deconvolution, batch-converting WAVs for the strict file formats of hardware samplers, watching MIDI traffic message by message, verifying that every knob on a controller sends what it should, and archiving SysEx patch dumps.
There are also editors for three rack and pedal units — a Boss SDE-3000D, a JoMoX Mod FM and a Behringer BM-18M — which put every parameter on one page instead of behind a small display and a handful of buttons. More are in progress, including several units whose original editor software no longer runs on any current operating system.
Everything runs client-side. The MIDI tools need a browser with Web MIDI support — Chrome, Edge, Brave, or Firefox after a one-time permission prompt. Nothing is uploaded to a server at any point.
The 32 tools on the site are free and stay free. An optional supporter pack on itch.io bundles offline copies of every tool, three tools that are not on the site, 25 impulse responses recorded from hardware, and additional datasets; it funds the hosting, and nothing on the public site is reduced to make room for it.
