Myousica, eighteen years later

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today is my birthday, and I’ve decided to open a time capsule.

Eighteen years ago, we started building Myousica — a platform for collaborative music creation in the browser. Record from your microphone, upload tracks, remix other people’s music, build songs together with strangers across the internet. We launched in September 2008 after nine months of development.

It was a startup. It ran for about five months before being paused, and the source code was eventually released on GitHub under the name Mewsic. I wrote about the technical details in a three-part series: the Rails platform, the Flash multitrack editor, and the audio pipeline. Those posts cover the engineering. This one is about the bigger picture.

The right idea at the wrong time¶

The core concept was solid: let anyone make music in a web browser, collaboratively. No software to install. Open your browser, pick a song, add your guitar track, share the result. A musician in Rome could start a beat, someone in Tokyo could add bass, a singer in São Paulo could lay down vocals on top. All in the browser.

The problem was that in 2008, browsers couldn’t do any of this natively.

To capture audio from a microphone, you needed Flash — an ActionScript front-end running in the Flash Player plugin. To stream that audio to a server, you needed RTMP — a Java media server (Red5) just to receive the audio and write it to disk as FLV files. To turn those FLV files into playable MP3s, you needed a pipeline of ffmpeg, sox, and background workers on the server side. To display a waveform, you rendered it as a PNG — the Canvas API wasn’t mature enough. To play back multiple tracks in sync, you built a custom playback engine in ActionScript with frame-accurate timing.

Retrospective on Marcello Barnaba

Myousica, eighteen years later

The right idea at the wrong time¶