Aviary Blog

Now anyone can create music and beats completely from scratch and right in their browser, by simulating almost 50 different instruments, ranging from common instruments like various drums, pianos and guitars to orchestral instruments like harps and flutes to more obscure (but fun!) instruments you may never have heard of like the balarimba and hammered dulcimer.

We spent the time carefully recording and toning each instrument so that you have a ton of variety to choose from. We opted to provide a simple point-and-click grid interface instead of requiring people to know musical notation, feeling that a point and click interface would be easier and more fun for most people to use and learn.

[Note: For those of you more attuned to precise musical notation, we highly recommend using our friends at Noteflight.]

Great for Simple and Advanced Users

Aviary’s Music Creator is incredibly simple and yet is also full featured, allowing more advanced users to mix and match any instruments – and even record your voice or upload your own custom sounds.

No Library Restrictions

Best of all, completed music made using our instrument library can be used by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial. We spent considerable time and money developing this library ourselves and have decided to give back to the community by releasing use of mixed sounds from our library under a Creative Commons – Attribution 3.0 Generic license.



We feel that by providing this tool without any commercial restrictions we will help the Internet cultivate and create an alternative shared library of musical loops that anyone can access and use without restriction.

For Aviary users specifically, this means that you will now have additional custom options beyond the thousands of professional tracks in the Quantum Tracks library that APM Music already generously provides in our audio editor, that may not be used commercially.

Export the MP3s

You can download any of the music loops you create in our new Music Creator as MP3′s. You can use them directly in Aviary’s online Audio Editor app as part of a larger sequence or even just to make your own custom ring tones!

Create some loops and share them with your friends – you can even use Aviary to assemble an entire song made by all of your friends together.

Here are some great loops that some of our users already made:

We are adding new instruments and sound-groups all the time and will be allowing Aviary users to add their own instruments as well. Next up will be a collection of human vocals, so you can create your very own human beatbox!

Unlockable features

And for those of you who were excited enough to read through to the bottom, we even made some of our experimental advanced beta features available right at launch (but you’ll need to unlock them first by inviting 5 friends)!

Just look for this button in the app to unlock the beta features:

Unlockable advanced features include:

* Record your own voice
* Upload your own music
* Trim custom mp3s
* Solo and mute individual tracks
* Control the overall track speed (Beats per measure)
* Control the “velocity” of beats (i.e. how soft individual beats are played).
* More custom track controls
* & more!

I can’t wait to see what kind of music you can all create. And a huge props to Alan Queen, Akshara Weave and the Aviary team for creating such a versatile and magical tool. Now what are you waiting for? Go make some music!