"We put a whole web browser in a VST plugin": WebSampler just made sampling the internet easier than ever
Open up a browser within your DAW and record audio directly to the timeline
If you're someone that likes to sample audio from the internet to use in their productions, lifting samples from platforms like YouTube can be a frustrating process.
Sure, it doesn't take that long to copy a link into one of those dodgy-looking YouTube to MP3 converters and download the results, but it's not exactly a breeze either. Maintaining focus is important when you're in the creative flow, and annoying little tasks like these can often throw you off your game.
Various solutions have been proposed to this problem. Once upon a time, we used audio routing programs like Soundflower and Blackhole to send audio from our browser to our DAW. More recently, we discovered SoundPaste, an app that allows you to copy and paste sound from any application and drop it directly on to your DAW's timeline.
A new plugin from WXAudio promises to streamline the process even further by bringing the browser to your DAW. That's right; this is a web browser in a VST plugin that allows you to record audio from any website, simply by hitting record and dropping the sample onto your timeline. It's that simple, really - an elegant solution to the problem of sampling the web, so useful that we can't quite believe nobody's thought of it before.
WebSampler is priced at $10 and comes in VST3, AU and standalone formats. It'll run on both macOS and Windows.
Find out more on WXAudio's website.
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I'm MusicRadar's Tech Editor, working across everything from product news and gear-focused features to artist interviews and tech tutorials. I love electronic music and I'm perpetually fascinated by the tools we use to make it. When I'm not behind my laptop keyboard, you'll probably find me behind a MIDI keyboard, carefully crafting the beginnings of another project that I'll ultimately abandon to the creative graveyard that is my overstuffed hard drive.