// the find
gridsound/daw
GridSound (1.58.5) is a work-in-progress free browser-based digital audio workstation following the Web Audio API 🎛🎹🎵✨ -- If you can, please sponsor us a little on our Patreon ❤️
GridSound is a browser-based DAW built on the Web Audio API — drums, synths, LFO, the works, all running in your browser tab. It's been in active development for years and is usable today at daw.gridsound.com. The target is musicians who want a zero-install workstation and developers curious about what Web Audio can actually do.
Active development with a push as recent as yesterday, so this isn't abandonware. The architecture is split into focused submodules (daw-core, gs-wa-components, gs-utils) rather than one monolithic blob, which makes the codebase more navigable than most hobby audio projects. Runs entirely in the browser with no native plugin dependency, which is a real engineering accomplishment given how poorly Web Audio handles tight scheduling. Has a service worker for offline use, which most browser DAWs skip entirely.
Half open-source per their own README — the cloud save backend and some components are not public, so you can't fully self-host or audit the whole system. Being built on Web Audio API means you're fighting the browser's audio thread scheduling; latency floors are higher than any native DAW and there's no ASIO/CoreAudio path. The repo is a collection of git submodules with no package.json or build instructions visible at the top level, making local development setup opaque. 1.8k stars for a five-plus-year project suggests it's respected but not widely adopted, probably because musicians don't reach for a browser tab when Reaper exists.