Vitkor NV-1

Probably hundreds of people have gotten their start at Web Audio API and Angular with the project and I have gotten several nice opportunities that have indirectly generated me a good return on the 2 month initial investment (I've spent more time later on on fixes and new features but the project hasn't substantially grown out of it). But I never got a direct revenue stream from it. This is why I added ads and now I get commissions on a few sales a month made from people who discovered them on the site of the NV-1.

After just 2 months I had a nicely looking, surprisingly well playing and sounding synth ready. I've designed the looks myself, learned everything and anything I could about synths and ultimately built a 3-oscillator subtractive synthesiser with fine tuning on all oscs, reverb and delay effects, low-pass filter, modulation, ton of great-sounding default patches, patch sharing by url and an interesting new envelope I designed myself.

The product got to the 1st page of HN and stayed there for... 10h? It was crazy. It was #1 on reddit's r/Javascript for over a day and got the attention of the media.

At the time it was likely the best (most playable) online synth out there.

After 1.5y of work on a product called Pagehop (launcher app aiming to change how we browse the internet), which wasn't working out, I was running out of money and was forced to soon go back to working for the Man.

I decided to have my "Last Hurrah!" doing something fun, yet learning some of the new technologies that got released on the web, while I was working on my own products.

This is when I saw a demo of the new Web Audio API combined with Web MIDI which inspired me to learn about Syntesisers.

I built a MIDI-playable single-patch synth with just one sinusoid wave oscillator and I instantly saw the opportunity to built something that sounds and plays well.