Free Online Music Tools — Make, Play, Practise and Listen in Your Browser

# Why all of this runs in a browser tab

Every tool on this page is a single HTML file. There is no installer, no account, no plugin, no runtime to keep updated, and no server doing the work. You open a URL and the thing is running. That is not a limitation being worked around — it is the reason these exist in the form they do.

The enabling technology is Web Audio, which has been in every browser for over a decade and is genuinely good. It gives you oscillators, filters, delay lines, convolution, compression and a sample-accurate clock, all in JavaScript. A kick drum here is not an MP3 of a kick drum; it is a sine wave whose pitch drops sharply, synthesised at the moment you hear it. A snare is filtered noise plus a tuned body. A hi-hat on the 909 kit is six square waves through a bandpass, which is roughly how the hardware did it. That is why a drum machine can be one file with nothing to download, and why it works on a plane.

The same applies to the parts that read rather than write. The tuner does pitch detection with an autocorrelation algorithm on your microphone stream. The decibel meter implements real IEC 61672 A- and C-weighting curves. The visualiser runs an FFT. None of it is sent anywhere, because there is nowhere to send it: these pages have no back end at all.

What “nothing is uploaded” actually means

It is worth being precise, because every site says this. When you open a file in the MP3 player, the browser hands the page a local file handle; the audio is decoded on your machine and the bytes never leave it. When the tuner listens, the microphone stream goes into an analyser node in the same tab. When you export a WAV, it is rendered locally and saved by your own browser's download mechanism.

The only network requests these pages make after loading are the web font and a privacy-first analytics ping that counts a page view and nothing else. There is no account system to leak, no database to breach and no file storage to misconfigure, because none of those things exist.

# Where to start, depending on what you want

Twenty-one tools is too many to browse. Almost everyone arriving here wants one of five things, so:

• “I want to hear a chord progression and play over it.” Chord Pad with Drums. Pick a key, hit pads, add a beat. It is the shortest path from nothing to a loop you can practise against.
• “I just need a beat.” Drum Pad Looper if you want zero decisions, or Drum Loop Studio if you want to build the pattern yourself.
• “I need to tune and get a click going.” Tuner and Metronome. Two tabs, done.
• “I want to record an idea before I forget it.” Live Loop Pedal to capture and layer it, then Audio Editor to tidy it up and export.
• “I want to listen to what I already have.” MP3 Player for your own files, Web Radio Player for streams.

# A whole session without leaving the browser

The tools were built one at a time rather than as a suite, but they chain surprisingly well. A realistic forty minutes looks like this:

Nothing installed, nothing uploaded, and a file on your disk at the end. The chord pad's MIDI export is the escape hatch if you want to continue somewhere serious: it carries the notes rather than the sound, so you can drop it into a DAW and play it back with real instruments.

# What these are good at, and what they are not

An honest comparison, because a browser tab is not a studio and pretending otherwise wastes your time.

The honest summary: use these to find the idea, and something bigger to finish it — or do not finish it at all, if the point was practice. Most sessions never need the bigger thing.

On phones

All of these work on a phone, and the pad-based ones are genuinely good on a touchscreen. Two caveats that are the browser's rather than the page's: iOS will not produce any sound until you have tapped the page once, which is why the first tap on a play button sometimes feels like it did nothing; and anything using the microphone needs you to grant permission each session on some browsers.

# Why there are so many of them

Because they were built to answer specific, narrow questions, and a tool that answers one question well is more useful than a suite that answers ten adequately. There is a drum machine and a drum pad looper because “let me program a pattern” and “just give me a beat” are different moods. There is a chord pad and a chord chart generator because playing a chord and writing it down are different jobs. Several started as something Jasper needed on a particular evening and then turned out to be useful to other people.

If the one you need is not here, that is the most useful thing you could tell me — which is what the next section is for.