Making music with someone else on the internet is still absurdly hard. Different machines, different plugins, missing sample files, a collaborator who does not own the same $600 piece of software you do. Audiotool has been chipping away at that problem since 2010, and today it is shipping its most aggressive answer yet: Audiotool 3.0, a ground-up rebuild of its browser-based DAW that treats music production as a multiplayer activity rather than a solo one.
The new version runs in web browsers and on tablets, with native mobile apps promised soon, and claims the lowest latency of any online music tool. The pitch is that anyone can drop into a session from whatever device is in front of them. For a user base that skews heavily toward gaming — Audiotool has a multiyear partnership with the Esports World Cup and a new one with the Esports Nations Cup — that framing is deliberate.
“Music’s past was highly social. So is music’s future,” said co-founder and CEO Andreas Jacobi. “We reimagined Audiotool from the ground up to serve that future and help music break away from today’s fragmented, gated production ecosystem.”
NEXUS is the actual news
The rebuild is the headline, but the more consequential release is Audiotool NEXUS, an open-source SDK that lets musicians and developers build instruments, effects, visualizers, music games, educational content and hardware-connected apps directly into the platform. NEXUS is also AI-enabled, using MCP and Context I/O to wire a creator’s preferred LLM into the DAW.
That is a genuine departure from how digital audio workstations have always worked. Ableton, Logic and FL Studio ship a fixed toolbox and let third parties bolt on VSTs at the edges. Audiotool is arguing the toolbox itself should be user-editable. “Think Google Docs meets a creative sandbox like Fortnite or Minecraft,” Jacobi said. “The DAW becomes a platform where creators can build, experiment, and make music together.”
Launch partners include Splice, Ujam, BandM8 and Fraunhofer, Europe’s largest applied research organization — which suggests the open layer is not purely aspirational. Musicians and developers are already building against NEXUS through Audiotool’s Let’s Build hackathon series, running through August 2026 with partners including BBC Research and Development and Music Hackspace.
The hard part is still the hard part
Audiotool’s history gives it credibility here. It launched one of the first online DAWs in Flash in 2010 and rebuilt it in HTML5 in 2017, so this is the third time the company has bet on the browser catching up with native audio. The platform remains free.
Whether an open SDK produces a real ecosystem or a graveyard of half-finished plugins is the question every platform of this kind eventually has to answer, and low-latency collaborative audio over the web is a brutal engineering problem that Audiotool will now have to defend at scale. Still, co-founder and producer Daniel Rowland’s framing is hard to argue with: “I’ve spent most of my life in studios, and the thing that got in the way of creativity was almost never the people in the room. It was the software.”
Audiotool 3.0 is live now at audiotool.com.
