#music software

Audiotool is a free, browser-based multiplayer music production platform with over 300,000 monthly active users across 200+ countries — a community that has created over 10 million tracks and more than 600,000 collaborations. Built for real-time co-creation from the ground up, Audiotool recently launched NEXUS, the first open developer platform for collaborative music production, giving developers, AI tools, and music apps full read/write access to live DAW sessions.

Running May 11-July 6, 2026, they will host a hackathon series around the world that will bring together students, musicians, music lovers, and developers to make the apps and DAW extensions they’ve always dreamed of using AI-powered coding and NEXUS, Audiotool’s SDK. Events will happen online on Audiotool’s Dev Discord, as well as in real life at partnering organizations who will hold hackathon sprints, meetups, and other moments of community connection and creation.

The resulting projects will go before a panel of judges, including Manon Dave, Head of Future World Design at BBC Research & Development, where he focuses on using emerging technologies to help creators better own, control and monetise their work through fairer systems. He is also an award winning technologist and music producer, having worked on projects for leading names including will.i.am and Idris Elba. 

Along with some of the best music schools in the world, such as Berklee and NYU in the US, Audiotool will collaborate with some of  its long-standing supporters, including the Esports World Cup, Esports Nations Cup, and the WHO Youth Council, to help amplify the message to young people everywhere. Let’s Build! is also supported by OpenAI, Base44, and ElevenLabs, among others.

With more than 300K MAU and millions of tracks and collaborations, the online DAW Audiotool was created to sweep away all barriers between people who want to make music together. Audiotool users have proven what's possible when these barriers fall: Almighty Quise, a teenager from Watts, California, made his track “Uno” on a school computer. It went on to hit Billboard and generate over 50 million Spotify streams.

Let’s Build! extends that mission, tearing down the wall between musical prowess, playfulness, and technical knowhow. It’s the first step in what promises to be the complete transformation of music into a flexible world where everyone can play thanks to AI code assistants. 

Audiotool recently launched a new layer, its NEXUS SDK. This umbrella SDK forms the perfect basis for “vibe coding” music apps that are as multiplayer and multifaceted as Audiotool itself. The platform can read and write all separate tracks of a project (song) and gives an AI a system-wide view of a music project, free from the limitations of other DAWs and their VST/plugin protocols. These capabilities make coding plugins, remote control programs, and other cool software far simpler. Audiotool has also made its SDK open source and offers documentation, ready-made prompts and example code to inspire and support aspiring developers and music makers. 

“Audiotool is a multiplayer music creation platform by design, and our ethos is community-first,” explains Audiotool co-founder and CEO Andreas Jacobi. “We have worked for years to remove barriers to collaboration, creativity, and exploration, and now technology is allowing us to tear down yet another, the technical barrier between a cool idea and an amazing new piece of software. If you can describe it, you can now build it. We can't wait to see what community members, music-loving developers, artists, really anyone who’s excited about coding, come up with.”

“I’m super excited to be invited to judge the Let’s Build! hackathon. I started out making tunes in my bedroom and hacking away on software similar to AudioTool, trying to find a unique sound for my music, so I know how powerful it is when you’re given the chance to get under the hood and bring your ideas to life,” says Manon Dave. “What Audiotool is doing here is opening that up even further, bringing creativity and coding together so people can build entirely new ways of making music. I’m excited to see what people create when you have the space to experiment.”

The company was founded by the team behind Make.TV's patented Live Video Router — the low-latency broadcast infrastructure powering live production for the NBA, NFL, BBC, and major esports leagues — bringing proven expertise in real-time distributed systems to music creation.

Audiotool is backed by Unlock Venture Partners, BITKRAFT, T.Capital (Deutsche Telekom), FTW Capital, and Spitfire Audio, with angel investors including Ralf Reichert (co-founder of ESL), Kevin Lin (co-founder of Twitch), Aaron Elharar (manager of Bruno Mars), and Stefan Glaenzer (Last.fm)

You can download it as RNRYO.toast_.sit here or here, and run it on modern systems by following the instructions below the images.

Open this in-browser emulator.

Drag the file you downloaded onto the emulated desktop.

Open The Outside World, then Downloads, and open the file you'll find there. Wait while its contents are extracted. Ignore the error message that may appear. If nothing new appears afterwards, close and re-open Downloads.

Drag the .toast file that will have appeared into Uploads in The Outside World. Wait for your browser to suddenly download it all at once as a .zip file.

Close the emulator's tab or window and open this other in-browser emulator.

Extract the .toast file from the .zip file and drag it onto the emulated desktop.

 I want to look at how much music production has changed, especially now that we’re in 2026 now. It’s honestly kind of wild. I was looking back at some of my old projects from a couple of years ago, and the way I make music now is totally different.

If you’re just getting into it or you’ve been producing in your bedroom for a while, here’s what I’ve noticed about where things are going.

First off, we have to talk about AI. A few years ago, everyone was scared that robots were going to write all our songs for us. But honestly? It’s not like that at all. In 2026, the software just acts more like a helpful friend who does the boring stuff for you. Like, if I’m stuck on a mix, I can just ask my DAW to "find the muddy frequencies" and it handles it. It doesn't write the melody for me, but it saves me from spending three hours clicking around trying to fix a kick drum. It’s a huge life-saver when you just want to get your ideas down before you forget them.

Another thing that’s changed a lot is "Spatial Audio." I remember when you needed a million expensive speakers to do 3D sound, but now, it’s just standard. Pretty much everyone I know is mixing for headphones using these new spatial plugins. It makes your music feel like it’s floating around your head instead of just being "left and right." It’s hard to go back to regular stereo once you get used to it—it kind of feels like moving from a black-and-white TV to color.

Also, it’s kind of funny, but even though our computers are faster than ever, we’re all obsessed with making things sound "old." Most of the new plugins coming out this year are focused on "Physical Modeling." Basically, instead of just playing a recording of a guitar, the software calculates how a real string would vibrate. It makes everything sound way more "real" and less "computer-y." I’ve been using this one synth that even simulates the sound of dust on a record and old messy cables. It’s weird, but the more digital we get, the more we want that "human" imperfection.

I guess the main thing I’ve realized is that in 2026, the software isn't really the star of the show anymore. It’s so much easier to use that you don't have to be a tech genius to make something that sounds professional. Which is cool, because it means we can actually focus on the music and the "vibe" instead of fighting with the computer all day.

To be honest, it’s a really fun time to be a producer. Whether you’re using the new Serum 2 (finally!) or just messing around on your phone, the tools are just... out of the way now.