A project, not a startup.

It began as a question about hashes.

Web audio plugins have historically meant two implementations that sound close: one in JavaScript for the demo, one in C++ for the plugin, and a slow argument about why the browser version is thinner. That’s a bad deal for everyone — the person playing, and the person who has to maintain both.

So the question was: can one piece of restricted TypeScript be compiled to both, and produce byte-identical output? The answer is in the vertical slice, where a single DSP source goes through the ScriptC compiler to native code and to WASM, and the PCM that comes out of a real Chromium AudioWorklet matches the native render sample for sample. Not “within tolerance”. Matching.

Everything on this site is downstream of that. If the browser and the plugin are the same code, then a free full-quality browser version costs a creator nothing to offer — and the “try before you buy” demo stops being a lie. The Listening Lab is on the site so you can run the comparison yourself instead of trusting this paragraph.

In the open, in public, with the seams showing.

The engine, the SDK, the CLI, and the example tools are a research preview; the licensing terms are still being worked out and will be announced before 1.0. What we can do today is develop in the open and describe the state of things accurately. The repository has the roadmap in it, including the parts that aren’t done — the plugin shell is a skeleton, the publishing CLI isn’t written yet, and the site says so on the tool pages rather than in a footnote. Status tags on every tool mean what they say:

shipped

— is in the repo and runs.

derived

— is a small remix of code that already works.

planned

— is a ticket and an intention.

We would rather ship a directory of four honest tools than a landing page for forty imaginary ones.

Being able to leave is the goal.

Exportable, not freemium bait. The intent is that tools can be cloned, built, and self-hosted, and that the SDK never requires an account — but the licensing that would guarantee that is not settled yet, so treat it as the direction rather than a promise already kept. What we will commit to now: creators keep their code, we never ask for exclusivity, and we never relicense anyone’s work. The hub — accounts, payments, hosting, signed builds — is the part that’s meant to be a business. The tools that make tools are not.

Credits and borrowed things.

Demo guitar

Amateur Guitar Play 13 from the Internet Archive, public domain (CC0 1.0 Public Domain Mark), shipped in the repository as electric-amateur-pluck.mp3. It’s the take you hear on every amp and pedal demo across the site. It’s an amateur recording of an electric guitar, which is exactly right — pedals should be auditioned on ordinary playing, not on a session ace through a $4,000 preamp.

ScriptC

The TypeScript-to-native compiler this engine is built on. A separate project; this repository is a downstream consumer and contributes patches upstream.

Reference implementations

web-audio-api (Rust, MIT) and webaudio-node were studied as behavioral oracles for Web Audio semantics. No code was copied; they were used to check that our answers matched theirs.

Cabinet impulse responses

Sources and licenses are listed on the Amp Rig tool page before it ships.

The tools themselves

Each carries its own author and license on its tool page. Directory listings link to the source.

Contact

Issues and pull requests on the repository, which is the honest answer for a project this size.