Can you DAW it Online?: The Challenges of a Web-Based Open Source Workstation

This article presents WAM-Studio, an open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) that leverages W3C standards such as Web Audio, Web MIDI, Web Assembly, and Web Components, as well as the Web Audio Modules (WAM) plugin standard (aka “VSTs for the Web”). Developed since 2022, WAM-Studio and its fork Attune have already been the subject of several publications. This paper focuses on performance (including latency management) and details the addition of new features, such as MIDI tracks that were not supported previously. Today, most online DAWs are closed-source, and the rare open-source initiatives are either unmaintained or less complete than the work presented in this article. WAM-Studio has been developed as an open-source demonstrator of Web standards and contains examples of design and implementation of functionalities that are complex to achieve correctly (audio and MIDI recording in synchronization with other tracks, offline rendering of a project, etc.) An online demo and a GitHub repository for the source code are available.