node.js ko
Eight Bit Beats
Eight Bit Beats
by somethingCoded
A collaborative, social beat and melody sequencer.
Judging Instructions
Drop in, state your name, and start a new track to jam with other users. Perhaps try and re-create your favorite video game tunes:
If the room is empty, tweet one of us: @mtoymil @travhimself @joshontheweb @bundy_kim, and we’ll hop in and jam with you.
We recommend using a stable version of Chrome, but it should work fine on most modern browsers. Small known issue where initial connection takes longer with developer version of Chrome.
Make sure you don’t block flash, as the sounds are compiled in a swf.
Who
joshontheweb — Santa Monica, CA
travhimself — Santa Monica, CA
bundy — Los Angeles
mtoymil — Santa Monica
How
Node.js, jQuery, Underscore.js, Backbone.js, Socket.io, Express, Less.css, Flex, Skeleton, eightbit.me
Votes
Your Vote
Voting is now closed.
Other Votes
(217)
CrabDude
contestant
geradjudgeTotal blast to play. Takes a bit of time to figure out how it works, but you guys do a good job communicating it (and it’s cool that you seem to hop on when ever somebody plays to help people understand it). Minus a point for design because it’s not immediately obvious how to get started. All in all, nice work!
- contestant
Thanks for the suggestions, gerad. Glad you had fun :)
elizabethchajudgeSo much fun to play with! I was amazed at the level of detail you provide to users — there are so many different sounds and beats to play with! It was hard to understand what the various settings were (i.e. “dj” vs. “sqr”) but that’s probably because I’m not a music connoisseur. Nice job and a few suggestions for your next version: give users the ability to copy/paste sections they’ve created and to test sounds while pausing the others (when there were lots of folks in the room, it was hard to know what I had done vs. what others had created)
- contestant
Thanks, Elizabeth. The naming was certainly a challenge, as we were striving to provide a very machine-like look and feel to the app. Thus we tried to have every function visible as a button to avoid dropdown menus and the like. This of course led to real estate issues. Your point is well-taken, however!
I like the copy/paste idea. Did you notice that we have a pause button, or would you like the ability to mute other tracks, and keep yours playing? Within the team, we’ve gone back and forth on that idea, since part of the fun of it is the organic growth of a groove through cooperation and iteration (a fine theory, but in practice sometimes it’s just chaos). Perhaps a user limit of 4 or 5 on a room would help things.
Thanks again for your review and feedback!
ChrisCinelli
contestantI like the design and the man running at the top but I do not get it. It would be good if you can test the sounds without having to connect add them and wait for the man to come by… in my session I ddi not see anybody playing. Maybe I am not a sequencer kind of a guy :–/
- contestant
Thanks for the review, Chris. The sounds play as soon as you click a square, so you do not have to wait for the man to run by. Also, for me, part of the sequencer experience is being able to iterate upon your track each time the track loops. I totally understand that this app might not appeal to everyone. Bummer that there was no one else in there. If you want someone to jam with, I’ll hop in right now…
slaskis
contestantDamn, this was tons of fun! Really well done, it didn’t work the first time I tried it but this time it worked flawlessly and a bunch of other users made it a lot of fun.
stonebranch
contestantIt’s really a fun piece to play around with. It seems to working flawless. Only two things missing really is the private room functionality and export. I also think the UI should have had more contrast to it and maybe would be an idea to indicate which row/instrument the mouse is currently at, just scale it up a bit for the active track.
NiDi
contestantAwesome work!
nathanhammond
contestantWow. Updates to keep state on switching tracks, exporting the patterns and “invitation only” rooms would just about do it.
iapainjudgeAwesome fun web app. It’s just like an online jam session. Things just works on Chrome and Safari. A download link could be great.
- contestant
Good to hear that you had fun, iapain. Did you have browser trouble? We tested in the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, but perhaps we overlooked something.
The ability to save/share/export was something we were dying to include, but we just ran out of time. Hopefully soon!
- iapainjudge
First off, good work done. It gets lots of jitters on FF 5.0 on both mac and linux. Would love to see export/share functionality.
sylvinus
contestantAwesome. It can get hard to make good music with total strangers but definitely feels like something possibly very fun to do with friends or with people from your band :) Some more contrast could improve the design IMHO.
zapnapjudgeWhat can I say, I love this…
I’d actually been playing around with a similar idea myself a few months ago (using node and soundmanager2), so I suppose I’m somewhat biased, but this is far better than what I had in mind.
Also, the 8-bit “theme” is a nice accompaniment.
Would be nice if the chat were persistent, and if the track positions remained fixed when you changed instruments. I wonder if there would be a turntable-like audience for watching DJs create songs? Or if you could take this further by allowing people to save and remix samples created by others…
Coreh
contestantPretty fun concept, and interesting use of the audio API + websockets!
I have only two quirks with it: 1) I could not find a way to export the songs created from the website. 2) It’s really hard to create something good, because the other users are constantly changing the other tracks in a chaotic manner. It would be cool to have separate rooms you could create, and share only with the people you wanted to compose with.
Other than that, pretty good entry!
pbcomm
contestantBYK
contestantI didn’t see you mention it but if you have used the AudioDataAPI I think you could have created something greater though this version already rocks! =)
lachlanhardy
contestantI had a lot of fun with this, but niggling things kept getting in the way, such as losing all my work when I switched modes(?). And particularly, the lack of any ability to lay a pattern down. The target areas are so small that it’s quite annoying to hit them all in a sequence to develop a pattern. I’d love to be able to copy a pattern out across the loop and then modify specific brackets afterwards.
Actually, pretty much everything seemed slightly too small. Maybe I’m getting old?
But anyway, it was a lot of fun and I think if you can iron out those usability issues and roll in a few management features such as saving and sharing tracks, you’ll have something super awesome on your hands.
remjudgeAbsolutely superb – great fun, great to see what people make together. I love this kind of anonymous collaboration tools.
Could do with a couple of tiny ui fixes, like remember the state of the track when I switch modes, but still good fun.
(if I could add extra points for the megaman running man, I would!)
- contestant
Thank you, rem! It’s so rewarding to see other people getting as excited as we are about the project. We agree there are lots of things that need to be tweaked, and we’ll be tackling those issues as soon as the competition is over.
Thanks again for your time and your vote!
- contestant
Thanks for the high marks, @rem. Means a lot.
dpwolfe
contestantVery cool.
paularmstrong
contestantFun for a minute, but it was really hard to do what I wanted without someone else ruining it.
Low on completeness because it didn’t work in anything but Chrome.
Overall though, easy to look at and definitely something new for real-time.
- contestant
Hey Paul, glad you liked the design of the app! We really wanted to add rooms and some type of admin system to avoid what you’re describing but we were only able to do so much in 48 hrs :( If you want a proper jam session feel free to ping one of us and at least one of us should be free to hang out. It’s weird that you had a hard time getting it to work on other browsers since we spent extra effort to compile the sounds into flash for cross browser compatibility. Hopefully we can eventually sort things out for other browsers if there are any issues.
JonRohan
contestantIt’s a fun and unique idea, from a usability standpoint, we need some more contrast, and larger click targets for notes.
peterlih
contestantI think it is my favourite project in tournament and I hope you guys make it. I love the idea of making music together. It is a little bit unhandy to click the small squares. Maybe it would be a good feature to store tracks somewhere or to share one track over all users. Currently there is no result. For the moment you are using it it makes fun, but what is the goal?
- contestant
Thanks so much, peterlih! We’ve got lots of small improvements in the pipeline that will address your concerns.
As for long-term vision, we’ve had a TON of top-notch feedback from people like you, and a few potential directions have emerged. We’re not yet 100% sure where we’re headed, but regardless, we’ll make sure that our users not only have fun while they’re jamming, but that they can leave with something cool as well.
3rd-Eden
contestantNice innovate way to start rocking with some funky beats.. The design suites the project and it felt really complete.
mapejudgeTop notch entry with slick UI and easy to jump right in. Would love to see private rooms and the ability to have more then one track per person. But for just having 48h this is great.
- contestant
Thank you, mape! Private sessions and multiple tracks per user are coming once NKO is behind us. :) Stay tuned!
b00giZmjudgeIn my spare time, I play as DJ in a german club for electronic music. I also produce music with artists which are scattered all over europe. This app could be one of the near future killer tools for real-time collaboration. No more sending .ALS files via email and waiting for the other one to respond – I love that idea :)
Thinking of this app as a “serious” collaboration tool for musicians, there are of course a lot of things missing like private rooms, the ability to upload own samples, and a functionality for saving and exporting your work. But this would something to think of after NKO ;)
The bad parts: Requiring Flash for using this is a bummer :( I’m using flash blockers all across my browsers and so I had a really hard time to get this to work. (Yeah, I know – RTFM, but it would be cool to find a solution without having to use Flash ;) This might also be the reason why this app burns a lot of my resources. All fans on my brand new quad core MBP 15" started to scream after a few minutes of playing around and the UI got less and less responsive. That’s why I only gave it 3 stars for utility/fun.
I’d love to see the next iterations of this project :) So keep it going.
- contestant
Thanks for the great feedback! You are right, flash sucks. We had to make a call between being cutting edge and cool or broadly accessible. We have gotten to know the guys at OMFL and are looking into better ways to handle web audio.
pthurlow
contestantAwesome design and pretty cool idea. I’d like to see some way to encourage collaboration though. its basically a mess when a lot of people join. some added game mechanics would be cool!
jasonhjudgeogom
contestantbpm up down is particularly great.
therazorbladejudgeThis is great! Can get a bit noisy with too many people – maybe add private rooms for invite-only mode. Got a bit old after a few repeated visits.
Same idea as KO8080.
- contestant
Private rooms are high on our feature list once the rush of NKO passes. Jamming with strangers can be rewarding, but we’d love to allow people to invite their friends into a room to create really tight, coordinate tunes.
Thanks for your vote!
rahimsjudgeFantastically awesome! Had a ton of fun messing around with this; the other folks and I made some slick stuff.
davidgovea
contestantVery cool. Would be nice to be able to control more than your own channel. A well-made collaborative sequencer. Knocked ya on innovation for the flash (I had to!) :P. Also, your beat timer seems slightly inaccurate. Not by much, but even a few ms is easily heard in musical applications
martinciu
contestantAwesome! I couldn’t stop playing!
- contestant
Thanks Marcin! We can’t stop playing either! I’ve been losing sleep over just hanging out with all the great people coming through.
ericbiellerjudgeThe app was awesome. Had a lot of fun. Only problem is I built an awesome beat, then clicked a different style and it deleted it all! Some kind of warning would be nice or maybe it should just keep your beat saved when you’re switching through. Great job though.
- contestant
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.
The handling of switching instruments is something we’ve gotten a lot of feedback about, and we definitely agree there should be warning at the very least — or better yet, a way to save and restore your tracks.
Thanks again for taking the time to vote!
- ericbiellerjudge
No prob.. not I just need to pull myself away from this long enough to get something done lol
Jaciones
contestantSo cool. I loved the look and feel of it. Awesome retry vibe, fun controls.
froderik
contestant
maraksquiresjudgeReally solid entry. For a 48 hour contest, I think this project did remarkably well. The design and ascetics are also also pretty cool.
I had to give low votes in innovation and utility for a few reasons:
The audio playback requires a Flash embed. Flash sucks. If you were able to overcome browser limitations to make a pure JS solution, I would have given a 5 in innovation.
Since all the sounds are 8 bit, you also could have used a JavaScript audio synth instead of using mp3s.
The project was pretty fun to use, but I couldn’t do multiple tracks as one user, and the kits didn’t exactly save when I cycled through them, so I lost the drum track I was working on for five minutes.
The timeline for each song also isn’t synced across each client, which would have been nice.
Overall, I think it’s a great job. I would love to see this open-sourced. I’m also curious if the ‘beatlab.swf’ file is something you guys made in-house or if it’s part of a pre-existing library.
ryanstevens
contestantSo fun! Nough sad
- contestant
Haha thanks Ryan, glad you liked it. We’ve been having a blast with it as well!
lovehasnologic
contestantGood idea, and pretty solid execution. This could be fun to play with, for sure, and I could see chiptune artists using this as a collaborative tool in the writing process. My only complaint is a major one (and probably one you could have executed were it not for the time limit) and that’s the ability to create new “songs”. Right now it’s a single song and everyone just adds a track to it, which becomes an aural mess quite quickly. I’d love to be able to start my own, fresh song, and as the owner, boot collaborators that make a mess of things. Perhaps also the ability to make private songs.
joaomilho
contestantUnfortunatelly it’s a little slow and the sound gets confuse… otherwise it’ll be just perfect. Top5 certainly.
ekryskijudgeThis app is super sweet! I also didn’t think that it would work very well but everyone that came to the room just kinda fell in line and picked up an instrument that wasn’t in use already. I’m amazed at how easy it is to collaborate and make really cool tunes! I really like the site design, the layout is very well thought out and provides a great UI. It is super easy to use and very intuitive especially because you see others creating music in real time.
One thing I really would have liked to see is that when you change instruments it doesn’t erase all the work that you had previously done with another instrument. It would be nice to have state saved between instruments so that you could try flipping between a few. Also, of course I would love to have non 8-bit, more realistic version. Overall this app is excellent and it is amazing how complete and well executed it is given the time frame. 8 bit beats definitely is one of the best nko entries.
- contestant
ekryski, thanks so much for your thoughtful comments. We were fortunate enough to have a team with three strong front-end developers, so we were able to bounce around lots of ideas on the UI.
You make a good point regarding switching instruments — we’ll definitely give some though to the way tracks are saved or transfered from one instrument set to the next.
Thanks again for your time and your votes!
seanami
contestantThis is cool. It’s something that doesn’t necessarily seem like it would work, but ends up being super fun, even with a few people. It’s a nice counterpoint to things like turntable.fm. Don’t just be the DJ, make the music! Bravo for a unique idea that’s also well implemented.
- contestant
Thanks, seanami! We’re pretty pumped with the way it turned out, and can’t wait to get back to work on it once the Knockout is done.
farhadi
contestantandymiller
contestantVery tight. Very impressive. Very cool idea.
- contestant
Right on! We really appreciate the kind words and the kind scores. Stay tuned, more features incoming post knockout!
atsuya
contestantawesome idea and execution! might be fun if people could create rooms.
- contestant
Thank you so much. Rooms are coming soon!
kazuyukitanimura
contestantIt is really fun to play with it.
swoodiejudgeaddicting, well designed, fun, fast, clever UIs, creator “peacelove” hanging out in the app is a nice touch, smart to hook in a chat ui. loved it.
- contestant
Happy to hear you liked it Sara! Not sure which teamate was peacelove, but you usually can find any number of us just hanging out laying down beats cause we’re pretty excited to see the product in action and being used by people!
- contestant
haha it was me. Not sure why I chose that name lol ;) thanks for the votes!
mranneyjudgeWow, what a great, fun idea. I wish there were some way to vote down or at least locally mute a track. Other than that, this is a really cool entry.
- contestant
Thank you! Yes, in addition to the transport and beats per minute controls, we’re going to add mute/solo functionality.
rauchgjudgeLoved the design, very fun and delivers a complete experience!
- contestant
wow, thanks for the high marks. It means a lot coming from you. we <3 socket.io!
danejensen
contestant
jimpickjudgeSuper fun! I can imagine this being further developed with all sorts of cool social features.
Worked well in Chrome, playback wasn’t smooth in Firefox and Safari.
blakmatrix
contestantwould be nice if could do more than one track when there are not a lot of people around
- contestant
Thanks for your generous scores! We have plans to allow users to add multiple tracks, but in the meantime you can ping one of us and we’ll hop in to jam with you.
csanzjudgeI can’t stop playing… enough said!
- contestant
Awesome! Thanks for your vote, csanz!
rhdoenges
contestantWOW
- contestant
WOW thanks for the vote and glad you enjoyed it :)
astro
contestantAwesome retro style
- contestant
Yo astro! Thanks for the compliment on the style. The idea started off as a more serious synthesizer app until someone suggested we go with a 8bit theme with chip tunes. We pretty much ran with the idea from there and never looked back!
ncb000gt
contestantSocial tracks. Nice. It would be awesome to add more tracks so that I could pick sample types.
- contestant
Hey ncb000gt, thanks for the vote! It was a hard discussion when it came to deciding whether to limit people’s control over multiple tracks in favor of promoting collaboration vs allowing for a more sandbox type gameplay. We definitely think we can hit a balance there for those who want to recreate their favorite tunes and also those who find themselves without as many people to play with.
electronicwhisper
contestantNice job!
Sound design is quite good and interface works well enough.
A few feature requests: when I switch between instruments (DJ, sin, etc.) I’d like it to save what I had made previously. Also in general some way to save, perhaps export a track as a url that can be sent to other people.
- contestant
Thank you! Keep checking back, we want saving/exporting as much as you do :)
chapel
contestantGreat idea, good implementation, just not fully baked as many entries are it seems, least of all mine. Glad to see some fellow music apps.
- contestant
Thanks! Collaboration, music, empathy, node.js! I’m overwhelmed by all these good things :). You should come on and jam sometime! Shoot me a tweet @mtoymil when you feel like it.
jcohen
contestantThis is really nice! I enjoy the cacophony that ensues ;). I saw something about chat, but couldn’t get it to work. Well done!
- contestant
Haha, it all depends on the other people, that’s the fun part. I’ve had some pretty epic jams where everyone just went with the flow and iterated together. Hmm, chat should work just by typing, it brings up a box near your avatar. You weren’t using IE were you? =_=
caseycrites
contestantAlthough not particularly useful, this was definitely an interesting display of what can be done with the platform. Would’ve loved some explanations of all the different things you can do and what all the abbreviations mean. Would probably give a higher “fun” rating if making music was more my thing. Good work!
- contestant
Thanks for the review, Casey. We all really like how this thing turned out, and we plan on making the app more accessible in future iterations. Try it out some more and have some fun! :)
airportyh
contestantLots of fun playing with this. A bit slow though, could be due to my underpowered Air.
- contestant
yeah, sorry about the lag. We plan on doing a round of optimizations to try and make it more smooth. I think we can. Thanks for the votes!
airportyh
contestantYou’re good. You only had 48 hours! I’ll totally play this when you release it to the wild.
aashay
contestantThis is sweet! I’d love the ability to make private rooms though.
Props for the running megaman.
- contestant
Thanks, private rooms and invite only rooms are coming soon. We probably spent a little too much time on getting megaman to run across, but we couldn’t imagine the app without him now :)
jflinter
contestant- contestant
Jack! thanks for the votes :) Also thanks for coming and hacking with us. perhaps next time more people will show up :P
niftylettuce
contestantAwesome job! Kinda resembles Mario Paint too much so I gave a lower rating on your Innovation. Not sure how this is useful, so it is more of a toy rather. It would be a great toy if you could invite friends to play with you on the same track. Design wise, the CSS is a little bugged with the width and having to scroll on x-axis. Nonetheless being able to increase the tempo of the current beat is a great feature, and the limits/restriction on it makes it feel complete!!!
- contestant
Hey niftylettuce. We’re not familiar with Mario Paint, but we’ll check it out.
We agree that the width of the content area is a little tough on smaller displays (hence the horizontal scrolling) — it was a tradeoff between keeping the UI usable and fitting in all the elements we needed. We’ll keep working at it.
Thanks for your comments!
amirmanjijudgeThis is absurdly fun with the right people. I was able to quickly lay down a sweet drum track, and sitting back and listening to people build melodies on top of it was a lot of fun.
It would be great if you could save sequences and play with sequences that other people have saved. Being able to highlight notes in specific keys (like being able to easily see all the notes in A minor, for example) would be another cool feature.
- contestant
Thanks for your comments, Amir. The ability to save sequences or load presets is high on our feature list. We want to do as much as we can to make the app approachable for non-musicians, either by suggesting keys, providing demo tracks, or some combination of the two.
Thanks for taking the time to judge NKO!
aaronheckmannjudgeLove it. Just wish I could have more than one track going at a time. Nice!
- contestant
You’re right, Aaron. We definitely want to allow users to create additional tracks, especially when there aren’t any other users around to jam with.
Thanks so much for your votes!
zachstronaut
contestantPretty cool for 48 hours work. The melody instruments don’t seem to work right… they seem to overlap rather than sustain which feels weird to me. The beat stuff is much better. Would be nice to extend the sequence, save, share, etc. Clear all notes would be good, too. Click and drag to place notes would also be nice… so you don’t have to click each individually. Maybe make it so left mouse is place and right mouse is delete.
- contestant
Thanks for the feedback zachstronaut. You mention lots of features that we would have loved to add had we had the time. We plan to get working on those soon!
stagas
contestantcarsonmcdonald
contestantThis is awesome!
mustardamus
contestant
jamesaduncanjudgecistov
contestantalfakini
contestantAwesome app, really fun :)
This is one of the first entries I tried after coding was up, and the first one that I thought was pretty dang cool. =) Bonus points for originality and fun.