Running it yourself

Auracle runs in a browser: the hosted app, a release bundle you serve yourself, or a build from source. This page covers all three, a booth set-up, and what it asks of your machine.

In the browser, hosted

1. Open auracle.alexnodeland.com/play/.

That’s the live build. It tracks main: it deploys from main once main’s CI is green. A tagged release doesn’t deploy on its own; it is tagged on main, and the live build follows main.

There is nothing to install, and nothing leaves your machine. The engine is WebAssembly running in your tab, and your sounds and taste live in your browser’s storage. There is no account, and no server to send anything to.

From a release bundle, offline

Every release carries auracle-vX.Y.Z-web.zip: the instrument, built, with no tools needed.

1. Unzip it.
2. Serve the folder over HTTP.
3. Open the address it prints.

unzip auracle-vX.Y.Z-web.zip
cd auracle-vX.Y.Z-web
python3 serve.py        # → http://localhost:8642

Any static server works (npx serve, php -S, and others), but it must be HTTP, not file://. The instrument uses module workers, and browsers won’t load those from a file.

The bundle is pinned to its tag. The live site tracks main, so it’s the same build on the day a release is cut, and may be newer after.

From source

Auracle’s foundations (quiver-dsp, fugue-ppl, and fugue-evo) come from crates.io.

1. Install a Rust toolchain with the wasm32-unknown-unknown target, and wasm-pack.
2. Clone the repository, build the engine, and serve it:

git clone https://github.com/alexnodeland/auracle.git
cd auracle
make wasm     # build the engine into apps/web/pkg
make serve    # → http://localhost:8642

make wasm puts ~/.cargo/bin first in PATH: a Homebrew rustc earlier in the path lacks the wasm standard library, and fails in confusing ways.

To work on Auracle rather than with it, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

At a booth

For a kiosk or a show floor:

1. Turn on Booth mode in ⌘K, or open the app with ?booth on the address (?booth=30 sets the idle time to thirty seconds; the default is a minute).
2. Leave it. With nobody at the keys, it plays itself.

What happens:

• It plays itself. With nobody at the keys, the instrument plays itself in PERFORM, through a set of presets. It holds a chord progression, moves two named controls under an invisible hand (their dials turn), lets Wander turn the knobs, then grows an offer in B and blends it in.
• It hands over. Any key, click, touch, wheel, or MIDI note stops it on the spot. The visitor is holding whatever was playing, with Wander still and BLEND home. Nothing it did while playing itself is logged or counted as a pick.
• The next visitor. ⇧Esc (or New visitor in ⌘K) forgets the visitor’s taste and starts again with the warm start, on a new pool (it takes ?seed off the address). Booth mode and PERFORM’s measured controls are kept, so the set stays instant.
• It measures ahead. As soon as booth mode is on, it measures the set’s presets for PERFORM in the background (Glass Pad, Acid Line, Loom, Undertow, Sub & Sparkle, Detune Dream, Wobble Board, and Cathedral), one at a time and only in a quiet moment. PERFORM keeps each measurement across reloads, so after the machine’s first boot no visitor waits for one.

A MIDI controller with eight knobs is picked up with nothing to set: the first eight knobs you turn take the first eight controls on PERFORM’s deck: with the six named controls on the panel, those six, BLEND, and WANDER.

Browser support

Auracle needs a current browser, with AudioWorklet, WebAssembly, module workers, and IndexedDB. All have been standard for years, and Auracle uses them hard.

Without Web MIDI, everything still works from the computer keyboard and the keybed on screen; see playing it.

Phones and tablets

Every size starts the instrument. On a phone held upright the levels are the bar along the bottom, KEYS at its end brings the keys up, and the bank rises from the bottom when you press the button of three lines at the start of the menu bar; any window under 1000 px wide keeps the bank behind that button. Boot costs about 40 renders, which a phone pays for on a slower processor, so its first sound is ready later than a desktop’s. The accessibility page says what goes where.

Every rack gesture works under a finger: knob drags, cable pulls, locks, and the ⋯ menus. Whatever a mouse finds by hovering is shown outright on a touch screen, because on a tablet, hover-to-reveal means never.

What it asks of your machine

• At boot: about 40 renders, spread across min(cores − 2, 6) background workers, or two if the device reports 4 GB of memory or less. Add ?farm=0 to the address to boot without them.
• While you play: four voices of modular sound on a real-time audio thread, and four more while PERFORM’s B holds an offer. Modest, but heavy work in another tab can cause dropouts. When the sound starts to fall behind (a slower laptop), Auracle protects it for as long as that lasts: B stays silent at BLEND’s home, and what the instrument does on its own (filling the bank, a generation’s walks, Wander, measuring in the background) waits while notes sound and for a second after, going on a step at a time after eight seconds of playing.
• At a refit: a few seconds of work at most, off the audio thread. You can keep playing through it.
• Storage: your session, in IndexedDB. Tens of megabytes at most, mostly the log of what you taught it.

Overrides

Added to the address, these change how it runs on your machine, or what it deals:

Without ?seed, every new session starts from a random seed of its own. With it, a fresh session (nothing saved in this browser yet) deals the same pool of sounds, under the same names, on any machine running the same version, at any worker count, so you can send the address to someone and they start where you did. (A sound you haven't named takes its name from the bank as it stood when the sound arrived, the first eight from each other, so how fast the bank filled can't change it.) The pairs, refits and offers after that draw from the same random seed, and repeat when the same things happen in the same order. A pair dealt before the pool has finished filling is dealt from the sounds that arrived first and waits for any not there yet, so the machine's speed can't change it either. (Without ?seed, a pair is dealt at once from the sounds that have arrived, and never waits for more.) A saved session comes back as it was. Which side of the table a sound stands on, and the warm start's nine cards, are shuffled either way, so no side or card is favored. Reset your taste… and a booth's next visitor take ?seed off the address as they start over, so a reset deals a new pool.