SoundCraft: A Free Online DAW That Runs Entirely in Your Browser

A free online DAW usually means a toy. Four loops, a paywall on export, a watermark on anything you'd want to keep. SoundCraft is the other kind: a multi-track DAW that runs entirely in a browser tab, where every editing feature is free and the audio is processed on your own machine with the Web Audio API instead of being uploaded somewhere. I work on ClipCraft, so this is a tour from the inside, with real screenshots, and I'll be straight about where a browser DAW still loses to desktop software.

A real multi-track timeline

Open SoundCraft and the first thing you see is a project modal: name a new project (it then auto-saves every change, about two seconds after you stop editing), reopen a recent one, or pick a temporary session to just mess around. A fresh session starts with four empty channels and you can add up to twelve. T adds an audio track, Ctrl+M adds a MIDI track.

Drag audio files onto a lane and they land as clips with waveforms. Clips move by their title bar, Ableton style, and their edges trim. Ctrl+E splits at the playhead. Everything snaps to the grid at your current zoom, and holding Alt places things freely. The zoom itself goes absurdly deep: keep scrolling in and the waveform resolves to individual samples, which matters when you're hunting a click at a clip boundary. Select several channels and Ctrl+G buses them into a group, so one reverb can process the sum instead of sitting on three channels. Undo covers ten steps.

Recording works the way you'd hope: each channel has an input picker, you arm it, and the take lands as a normal clip. One honest gap here: there's no input monitoring or latency compensation yet, so tight overdubs take a little trial and error.

MIDI, the piano roll, and the instruments

Add a MIDI track, press Ctrl+Shift+M (or right-click the lane) to insert a MIDI clip, then click its title bar and the piano roll opens in the workspace below the timeline. B toggles the pencil. There's a velocity lane, a Fold view that hides unused rows, quantize, and legato/staccato note tools. Edits are audible during playback, so you can leave the loop running while you rework a melody.

A MIDI track is silent until you give it an instrument, and there are five to pick from:

• A sampler modeled on Ableton's Simpler: one sample, played chromatically across the keyboard.
• A drum kit with per-pad effect chains and a built-in library of 141 sounds across 9 categories.
• SynthCraft, a subtractive synth with two oscillators plus noise, a filter with its own envelope, an LFO, and presets.
• A grand piano playing the multi-sampled Salamander Yamaha C5 (29 real samples, not synthesis).
• DJ Decks: a full two-deck mixer in a floating window you can tear off onto a second monitor. Every control is MIDI-mappable, and one press of its record button captures your set to an audio channel.

Fifteen effects in the rack

The ☰ button opens the browser panel with the effect tiles: Equalizer, Auto-Tune, Reverb, Delay, Chorus, Distortion, Compressor, Auto Filter, Phaser, Flanger, Gate, Limiter, Pitch, Auto-Pan, and Nightcore. Drag one onto a channel or click to add it to the focused one. The EQ is an eight-band parametric, and the Auto-Tune is real pitch correction with Antares-style controls: retune speed (0 ms gives you the hard robotic snap), Flex-Tune, Humanize, and eleven scales. All fifteen work in playback and in exports. The Nightcore effect got popular enough that we wrote a separate guide to making nightcore with it.

Automation covers more than volume. Any effect parameter, pan, and even an effect's on/off switch can get an envelope drawn across the lane. Alt-drag a segment to curve it. There's also an automation record mode: arm it, hit play, and turn knobs; the moves are written into the envelope at the playhead, MIDI controller included.

Your own VST3 plugins, in a browser

This is the feature no other browser DAW has. ClipCraft Bridge is a small free companion app (about a 5 MB installer) that hosts your installed VST3 plugins and connects them to SoundCraft over a local socket. Omnisphere, Massive X, and Kontakt show up as instruments you can play live from a MIDI keyboard; MIDI clips render through the real plugin. Effect plugins work too: bounce a clip through Auto-Tune Pro, or run Auto-Key as an analyzer without changing the audio. Plugin state saves inside your project, so reopening a song restores the exact patch. iLok-licensed plugins are fine.

What does a free online DAW actually cost?

The editor is free. Not free-trial free: there's no watermark, no export wall, and no feature list split into "starter" and "pro" editions. ClipCraft's paid plans sell storage for saved projects (the free plan includes 100 MB, which fits a handful of songs) and tokens for the AI tools that run on our servers. SoundCraft itself never spends a token; everything above happens on your machine. So a free account gets you the entire instrument.

Exporting and posting your track

The Export dialog renders the master bus, any single channel, or a bar range, as WAV or as a 192 kbps MP3. You can also download the whole session as a .clipcraft.zip project file and re-import it later, which doubles as an offline backup. And there's a third path: Post track renders the mix and publishes it to your ClipCraft profile as public, link-only, or private. Public tracks land on the music feed with cover art. If you want raw material to start from, our vocal extractor walkthrough shows how to pull an acapella out of a finished song and bring it into the timeline.

Where a browser DAW falls short

I'd rather tell you now than have you find out mid-session. Performance depends on your machine, and a 100-track orchestral template belongs in a desktop DAW; SoundCraft caps at twelve tracks partly for that reason. Clip transpose is tape-style, meaning pitch and speed change together like a record, and there's no pitch-only stretch yet. Recording lacks input monitoring, as mentioned. If your work lives in hour-long multitrack recording sessions, keep your desktop DAW. If you make beats, edit songs, mix vocals over instrumentals, or produce with AI-generated audio, a browser tab now genuinely covers it.

The fastest way to judge a DAW is to make something dumb in it for twenty minutes. Open a temporary session, drop in a loop, draw a melody, and see if it fights you. Mine didn't.