Submitted by twovests in technology
Sfxr was made in 2007 as an interface over some relatively-simple wave manipulation functions, with the express purpose of making sound effects fast for a game jam: https://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html
Sfxr is made by the same developer as Sculptris, a wildly impressive 3D sculpting app. The developer was immediately hired by Pixologic, makers of the commercial Zbrush, who presumably and rightfully felt threatened.
I thought that was worth mentioning, because developing Sculptris is wildly impressive, while Sfxr is a golden idea with a relatively simple implementation.
But Sculptris is dead, while Sfxr lives on in the literal dozens (hundreds?) of clones. (I said the implementation was simple!) There is a clone for probably any game engine with a plugin system you can think of, and for any GUI toolkit you can think of.
(Except for Blender. I'd love to have a Sfxr waveform editor for 2D/3D/4D waves for geometry nodes and shaders. But that is an incredibly niche wish...)
By the way, shout out to the Bfxr dev for the 'archaeology' section for digging even deeper into the history of Sfxr.
Anyways- why do I make this post? Well, I've tried those dozens of Sfxr clones. Jfxr is by far my favorite.
Why? ... Well, a few specific things:
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The person who made it seems cool. Their
@links to a Twitter which is now deleted and they're on Mastodon instead, they're anti-AI, and I've seen them around in the Godot community. They aren't explicit in their politics, but they interact with cool trans people online. I can't speak for the devs of the other good Sfxrs out there, but this is a minimum. -
It's free. Unlike Jsfxr which has a $3/mo to $29/mo subscription, Jfxr is free and open source. I'm not against proprietary software,
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Online and implemented in JavaScript (rather than flash- remember that?), like Jsfxr and bfxr, so no downloads needed.
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Live waveform preview. That's the biggest thing.
The Godot port seems to have some buggy waveform manipulation issues on top of some UX issues (everything is a 0.0 to 1.0 float, rather than units like "Hertz" or "decibels", and the sliders are broken in ways I don't understand), so I'd avoid that even as someone who uses Godot.
Why am I making this post? Well, I like Jfxr so much. Bfxr is in active development though, but for now, I'm blasting my blips with Jfxr.