The guide

poptart

Write short patterns; poptart plays them on its own synths, samplers and effects, or on your VST/VST3 plugins, and turns any of their knobs while it plays.

Write short patterns; poptart plays them on synths, samplers and effects built into this page. Nothing to install.

The poptart window: code on the left with the playing notes boxed, the tracks and macro knobs on the right. — A song playing. The boxes in the code are the notes sounding right now.

A first sound

A line that starts with a name and a colon is a track. Evaluate the buffer with {mod+enter} and every track plays; {mod+.} stops. Every example in this guide is the real editor: press ▶ play, click into the code to change it, and double-click a name like pianoroll, lfo or synth to open its editor. The examples play in this browser, on the same devices the app has, so they never touch what the app is playing; copy takes one to the app.

kick: s("bd*4").postgain(0.3)
hats: s("hh*8").vel("1 .5").postgain(0.3)
bass: note("c2 c2 eb2 g1").synth("Wavetable")
  .fx("Filter").param("Cutoff", sine(0.25).range(0.3, 0.7)).postgain(0.3)

Change a number and evaluate again: the new version takes over without a gap. That is the whole workflow.

Chapters

Read them in order once, then come back for what you need.

help as you type Autocomplete (it opens by itself, or Ctrl+Space) shows every name with its signature and a short description. Hold Ctrl and hover over code you've written to see the same thing.