Takes
A take records one performance as timestamped events; it replays online or offline and exports as audio, MIDI or video.
A take is the record of one performance of one Toy: every gesture, note, preset change, transport change and data message, stamped with the audio frame it happened at. It is small, portable JSON (application/vnd.tunetoys.take+json, at most 8 MiB and 200 000 events), and it can be replayed later to produce exactly what you heard.
What is recorded#
- The Toy itself at the starting revision, or the immutable release it was played from, plus sample rate, block size and tempo.
- Events: control gestures and values (one value per control per block), notes, presets, transport start, stop and seek, raw MIDI, authoring edits made mid-take, clock re-anchors, markers, and data messages from host nodes, each bounded to 64 KiB.
- Never: device bindings, the bytes of an audio input file, vault keys or account connections. A take of an effect replays silence at its input when the original input is not available, and says so.
Replay#
Online replay loads the take's Toy and feeds its events to the running engine at their frames; recorded values move controls as automation, and your own gestures override them until the next recorded value.
Data nodes with side effects do not run during replay: Web request, WebSocket, LLM chat, Cron, addon nodes and unseeded Random are silenced and their recorded outputs are played back. Pure nodes downstream recompute. So a take of a weather piece or an LLM melody replays offline, with no network and no key.
Offline rendering drives the same events through the engine block by block: the same take at the same sample rate gives identical audio.
Exports#
From a take: WAV (rendered in the browser for takes up to 60 seconds, otherwise by the worker service), MP3, OGG and FLAC (worker), a Standard MIDI File of its notes, the take JSON itself, and platform presets such as YouTube or vertical shorts (worker). Exports are downloads; nothing is uploaded to a platform for you.
Recording a take works in the browser today; recording and replay inside the Player plugin are planned.
See also#
Data cables, Presets, Secrets and the vault.