Soundation, online music production software, released their new music studio built on WebAssembly Threads, after working closely with Google. It is the first music production software to run on WebAssembly Threads, which contributes to considerably improved speed, performance, and stability when producing music in a browser.
Its online music studio is used by over 80,000 creatives who produce music directly in their web browsers. For Soundation’s users, the WebAssembly technology provides an improved performance on multicore machines, between 100-300 percent*, according to measurements.
Soundation has been collaborating with Google’s WASM and Chrome Audio teams for over a year, working to optimize the implementation of Soundation Studio based on WebAssembly, with support of multithreading and shared memory.
Adam Hasslert, CEO, Soundation, said, “Implementing WebAssembly Threads is a key part of our mission to build the next-generation music production service online. This technology will have a significant impact on how web apps are made in the future, and it’s essential for us to lead this development and offer our users the most powerful alternative.”
Thomas Nattestad at CDS, Product Manager, WebAssembly, said, “Soundation is one of the first adopters of WebAssembly Threads. They use these Threads to achieve fast, parallelized processing to seamlessly mix songs. Adding just a single Thread doubled their performance, and by the time they added five threads, they more than tripled their performance.”
How did Soundation conduct the tests?
Soundation made tests of complex Soundation Studio project (consisting of 10 audio tracks, 12 synthesizers, 270 audio regions with audio samples and notes with 84 filter effects applied) to generate the audio file.
The test was later run on Ubuntu 16.04, Chrome 72.0.3584.0 (64-bit) on board they had Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ. They then compared systems based on WebAssembly, PNaCL, native application using different processing buffer sizes in ring buffer. WebAssembly version has been tested using different number of threads.
Here’s a video by Thomas Nattestad, the Product Manager for WebAsssembly, introducing Soundation.
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