BytebeatCloud

BytebeatCloud is a modern, social, and mobile-friendly environment for experimenting with bytebeat and floatbeat audio.

It aims to go beyond traditional “paste code and play” tools by offering publishing features, user profiles, and an evolving community-driven experience.

Why another Bytebeat app?

BytebeatCloud brings a social layer on top of bytebeat. You can still generate a simple share link, but you can also:

• publish posts,
• browse popular or recent compositions,
• favorite works,
• fork other users’ expressions,
• and build a profile with your own creations.

This makes it closer to a creative platform than a standalone tool.

Differences with other implementations

The audio engine and expression interpreter uses Javascript. this makes this app closer to web based implementations than the original C-based ones.

While most bytebeat composer apps allow arbitrary lengths, BytebeatCloud encourages tiny programs by limiting the expression size to 4096 characters.

Features

Audio Engine

• Three audio modes: uint8 (classic bytebeat), int8 (signed), and float (-1 to 1)
• Configurable sample rate: 8kHz to 48kHz
• Real-time expression editing: hear changes as you type
• Master gain control: adjust output volume

Creation & Sharing

• Create posts: publish your bytebeat expressions with title, description, and tags
• Draft mode: save work-in-progress without publishing
• Fork posts: remix other users' expressions with attribution
• Share links: generate shareable URLs for any expression
• WAV export: export your bytebeat as a WAV file
• Video export: export your bytebeat as a video with waveform visualization
• Playlists: create and share playlists

Discovery

• Explore feed: browse recent, trending, and weekly challenge posts
• Personalized feed: see posts from users you follow
• Tags: categorize and filter posts by tags
• Length categories: filter by expression complexity

Social

• User profiles: customize username, bio, and social links
• Follow system: follow other creators
• Favorites: save posts you like
• Mentions: tag other users with @username
• In-app notifications: get notified of follows, favorites, forks, and mentions

Weekly Challenges

• Bytebeat of the Week: themed creative challenges every Saturday
• Hall of Fame: browse past winners
• Community voting: most-favorited entry wins

Experience

• Dark mode: multiple color themes
• Responsive design: works on desktop and mobile
• Progressive Web App: install on your device
• Live waveform visualizer: see your audio in real-time
• Auto-skip play modes: autoplay next track in a list after some time
• Play queue: organize play queue, reorder or shuffle items

Run locally

First, install NPM dependencies.

npm install

The backend uses Supabase. To start Supabase locally, run

npx supabase start

This will start a local Supabase project, prepare the database, and print connection info that you'll need in next step.

Create a .env file at project root and put the following content, replacing URL and key with the printed info.

# Project URL
NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL=http://127.0.0.1:54321

# Publishable key
NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY=sb_publishable_*****

Then, run the frontend.

npm run dev

Test locally

Unit tests

Install dependencies

npm install

Run unit tests:

npm run test:unit

E2E tests

Install dependencies and browsers:

npm install
npx playwright install

In another terminal, run tests:

npm run test:e2e:ui

This command will start the Supabase local instance, the front end dev server and run the tests in UI mode.

TODO

• User registration and login
• Manage profile (edit username, delete account)
• Create and share musical expressions (share link)
• Create posts
• Edit posts
• Explore posts (recent, popular)
• Add to favorites
• Transport controls
• Visualizer
• Mobile layout
• Fork posts
• Dark mode
• Responsive design
• Progressive Web App
• Length categories
• Arbitrary sample rate
• On-the-fly update of edited expressions
• Follow users
• Feed (global and personalized)
• Recent posts
• Trending posts on last 7 days
• In-app notifications
• Master gain
• Support SR up to 48kHz
• Post description
• Tags
• Signed int mode
• Video export
• Bytebeat of the Week
• Report posts or users
• Block/unblock users
• Comments
• Playlists

Coming later

• Change history
• Offline mode
• Offline pre-rendering
• Reject silent/too loud posts
• Moderator tools
• Pin posts on profile
• Search posts by name
• C-compatible badge