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How do you pronounce Hz?

Hz will answer to any of these pronunciations

What platforms does it run on?

HzWeb runs anywhere you have a full-featured browser and a reasonable quality audio system. It runs best on systems with a keyboard, hard to program without one!

Hz runs on Windows 10,11 x86-64 and MacOS M[1-5]. Linux is currently unsupported.

How much does Hz cost?

Hz is offered free of charge so the biggest cost of Hz is the investment of your time! Occasional or regular tips are welcome as this helps keep our attitudes, computers and website well-adjusted.

Hz is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Can I use Hz if I'm not a programmer?

There are some usage modes that require little or no strenuous programming. If you want to learn about audio programming, Hz may be a good place to start. If you don't want to touch coding, then Hz isn't for you.

How does Hz compare to HzWeb, etc?

Hz and HzWeb/WebAudio are both programmable via JavaScript. HzWeb uses the WebAudio audio engine that's built into all popular Web browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, …). It therefore can't support native (CLAP, Vst3, …) plugins. WebAudioModules are the proposed standard format for WebAudio plugins and HzWeb supports them.

Hz is a downloadable native program that only operates on recent windows and MacOS systems. It is built atop a custom audio engine as opposed the WebAudio standard. Hz supports high-performance, modern CLAP plugins.

More comparisons can be found here.

Which multinational corporation is really behind Hz?

Yeah, right. See credits.

Our idea is to make software for our own use and then share the results on a zero-calorie marketing budget.

Why Hz when Fiddle?

We decided to create Hz and to deprecate Fiddle because ChucK's custom-language and runtime offered no advantages over either JavaScript or Lua. By "moving on", we broaden the potential audience and leverage the significant community investments in improving and promoting these languages.

This means we can evolve our system more quickly and be more responsive to feedback. ChucK's runtime is fundamentally single-sample oriented which means that, while it's more expressive it's also slower. It's harder for it to take advantage of data parallel processing. So the move to Hz results in improved audio engine performance.

Is Hz open source?

It's inevitable, but ping us to raise the priority.