Audiotool's Impressive 'Pulsate' Synthetizer Chrome App Uses Nothing But the Web

If there's one company that has embraced the cloud even before most people knew what the term meant, not that they do now, it's the makers of Audiotool. You may not have heard of it, but it's the best audio production app on the web today.

It's also one of the funnest ways of making music on a computer, period. The developers started out with Flash, Java and JavaScript, since that was what they had to work with at the time.

But recently, they've been gravitating towards web technologies, to make sure their apps ran on as many devices as possible, if nothing else.

The perfect example of this trend is the launch is the Chrome and Android version of Audiotool's Pulsate app. It's been available for the iPad for many months now, but the latest release is based on things like WebGL and HTML5.

"Today marks the launch of Pulsate for Android and Google Chrome. We are really excited about this release since this is our first Android application and it is a major milestone for our internal development efforts," Audiotool announced.

"Pulsate for the browser is using open web technologies like WebGL and the Web Audio API. This is a major step for audio synthesis using HTML5 – no plugins required," it explained.

In Chrome, the graphics are handled by WebGL and HTML5 but OpenGL ES 2.0 is used in Android. The interesting part about the two apps is that they share most of the code, the team created a dedicated framework which ensures the devs only have to write code once.

The audio synthesis part, arguably the most important part of the app is based on Audiotool's existing technology. That said, in the browser version, a resampler is sometimes used to ensure that the app works and sounds the same on all computers.