Effects plugins for any file.

At a glance

What these plugins are

Web Audio Modules 2 (WAM2) is an open standard for audio plugins that run in a web page, the way VST3 and Audio Units plugins run inside Ableton Live, Logic or Reaper. A WAM is a small program with its own processing and its own panel, written in JavaScript or compiled to WebAssembly, often from Faust, Csound or C++ DSP code. The ones listed here are the community collection published at webaudiomodules.com: most come from the Wimmics team at Université Côte d'Azur (Big Muff, TS9 Overdrive, Vox Amp 30, Grey Hole, KBVerb, PingPongDelay, StonePhaser, ThruZeroFlanger, Csound Pitch Shifter and more), and a set of simpler utilities from Sequencer Party (Simple EQ, Simple Delay, Microverb).

They are not VST plugins. A VST3 or AU file on your computer cannot run in a browser tab, and this page cannot load one. What you get instead is the same idea, a box with knobs that changes the sound, with nothing to install and nothing to pay for.

How it works

When you pick a plugin, its code loads from webaudiomodules.com and its panel opens on this page. The preview plays your file in a loop through the chain, live, so you can turn a drive knob or a reverb's decay and hear it immediately. When you press Apply, the page reads each plugin's settings, builds the same chain again in an offline renderer at your file's own sample rate, and pushes the whole file through it as fast as the computer allows, which is usually much faster than playing it.

That second pass is the part we measured. A plugin has to give back exactly the settings you made and process them the same way offline as it does live, and not every one does. We test every plugin in the list in a headless browser: it must load offline, render the same file identically twice, and restore a saved setting exactly. The ones that failed are left out. Of the 31 that remain, 26 came out sample for sample identical to the live preview in our test, and carry an exact mark. The other five (Blipper, Grey Hole, Microverb, OWLShimmer and Temper) give the same effect but differ from the preview in the detail, by more than our threshold: their internal modulation or state starts afresh each time a copy of the plugin is made, so a sweep or a shimmer lands at a different point.

Some plugins delay the sound internally. The Csound Pitch Shifter, for example, comes out 2,846 samples late. We measured each one with an impulse and trim that delay off the front, so a processed video stays in sync and an editor clip sent back lines up with the original.

When you'd want this

• Re-amping a DI guitar or bass. Record the instrument clean, then try Vox Amp 30, OSCTube, TS9 Overdrive or Big Muff on it afterwards, which you cannot do if the amp was printed on the recording.
• Putting a vocal or a voice-over in a space. Grey Hole and KBVerb are large, modulated reverbs; OwlDirty and OWLShimmer are lo-fi and shimmering. Turn the mix down for a room rather than a cathedral.
• Sound design for a video. Drop the MP4 in, run its sound through a delay or a frequency shifter, and get the video back with the picture copied untouched.
• Trying a plugin before committing to it in a session. The same plugins are in the audio editor's mixer, on tracks, with automation and a send to a reverb bus.

Using it well

Order matters. Distortion before a reverb sounds like an amp in a room; a reverb before distortion turns the reverb tail into fuzz. The chain runs left to right, and the arrows on each plugin move it.

Watch the level. Fuzz and amp plugins add a lot of gain. If the result would clip, it is pulled under −1 dBTP with a true-peak limiter rather than distorted a second time, but a plugin's own output knob set sensibly sounds better than any limiter.

Ring-out is off by default. The file comes back exactly as long as it went in, which is what video and editor clips need. For a song that should end on a decaying reverb, tick "let reverbs and delays ring out" and up to twelve extra seconds are kept, cut where the sound falls below −90 dBFS.

What you lose

Control over the code. These plugins are written and hosted by other people and run in this page like the rest of the site. They see the audio you play through them, nothing is sent anywhere by us, and we list only the community's own collection: the page never loads a plugin from an address in a link.

Native plugins. Your Waves, FabFilter or Neural DSP plugins cannot run here. Export from the browser and process in your DAW for those.

A generation of quality on lossy output, as with any re-encode. Choose WAV or FLAC if the file is going back into a session.