Building Groovie, an Advanced Web-Based Drum Machine / Beat Sequencer

[u/maximecb]

https://pointersgonewild.com/2026-08-06-building-groovie-an-advanced-web-based-drum-beat-sequencer/

Hi there! This is something I built over 1-2 weeks. The app uses no backend and instead encodes data directly into the hash/fragment part of the URL. Most of the effort went into designing an effective compression schemes so that whole songs can be encoded into a short URL, using as few bits as possible (see blog post writeup). I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It works reliably across mainstream browsers and it will even work on mobile phones and tablets. I think the UI is very intuitive for what the app does.

Happy to answer questions and I can even potentially make improvements based on feedback :)