Browser tools.
Built for
real use.
Function should never be boring. Every tool on this page started as a problem that needed solving during music production or development work. No installs, no accounts, no subscriptions — just high-performance utilities that live entirely in your browser and work straight away.
Monitoring levels accurately is the difference between a clean take and a digital mess. The dPaul VU is a high-sensitivity monitoring tool that captures incoming audio via the Web Audio API to provide real-time decibel tracking, peak history, and signal-to-noise visualisation.
- ProcessingReal-time Fast Fourier Transform
- Range-40dB to +6dB full scale
- FeaturesPeak Hold · Test Tone · Reset
- EngineVanilla JS / Web Audio API
3D render — the VU meter as a physical device
Battery powered.
The dPaul VU started as a browser utility. But at a certain point the question becomes inevitable: what would this actually look like as a physical object? This concept render explores exactly that — a slim, pocket-sized VU meter in deep navy blue, running on battery power, with the full feature set of the browser version built into a device small enough to clip to a mic stand or drop into a gig bag.
The display carries over directly — large blue LED numerals for the decibel reading, signal bar across the middle, peak history below. The three hardware buttons at the bottom mirror the browser UI: MIC input, TEST tone, and RESET. Status feedback runs along the bottom edge. Everything that works in the browser, translated into something you could hold in one hand.
It doesn't exist yet. But it could.
Concept render — pocket hardware VU · battery powered
Voiceover work often requires a quick turnaround. This tool bridges the gap between raw text and professional-grade audio by integrating high-fidelity AI voice models. Granular control over speed, pitch, and export options makes it a clean interface for rapid vocal prototyping.
- IntegrationUnreal Speech API + Browser Fallback
- ControlsPitch · Rate · Multi-voice Selection
- ExportDirect WAV Download
- Format44.1kHz High-Fidelity Audio
3D render — the TTS engine as a physical device
Building these tools taught more about JavaScript than any tutorial ever could. Dealing with the Web Audio API for the VU meter meant understanding buffers, sample rates, and how browsers handle real-time input. Getting HTMLHint integrated into HTML-Live meant reading API documentation properly for the first time — because the feature wouldn't work without it.
The Text-to-Speech tool was a lesson in API integration — handling asynchronous requests, managing the handoff between local browser capabilities and remote AI processing, and building a UI that made the complexity invisible to the person using it. If a feature didn't exist, it had to be built. If a script crashed, the logs had to be read until it didn't.
HTML-Live came from a more personal frustration. Reading through hundreds of lines of code in a flat text editor, switching between browser tabs to see the result, losing track of where things were — all of that friction adds up. The solution was to build the tool that should have existed already. Which, it turns out, is how most useful things get made.
The goal is always a single-file utility. If a tool can run entirely from one HTML file, it can live anywhere — on a USB stick, a shared folder, a GitHub page, or sent as an email attachment. Portability is the core philosophy of the dPaul Tech Lab. No dependencies, no server, no setup.
Every tool on this page is free to use. The work that goes into building and maintaining them takes time — if a tool has been useful to you, a coffee goes a long way.