Audiotool's Let's Build! hackathon winners range from a 3D bunny party game to a BBC Maida Vale reverb

More than 2,000 people signed up for Audiotool’s first Let’s Build! hackathon, and on October 7, 2026 the browser DAW named its 6 winners. Every app was built on NEXUS, Audiotool’s open-source SDK, and the judges picked one winner per category from a shortlist of 18.

The range is wild. One winner is a 3D party game where bunnies mix loops on a turntable, and another puts your track inside BBC Maida Vale Studio 1, where artists from the Beatles to David Bowie recorded.

And Score IO, a tool that turns Audiotool projects into sheet music, was the judges’ only unanimous pick.

The 6 Audiotool Let’s Build! winners, category by category

5 of the 6 winners were built by one person, working from Poland, Pakistan, Washington state, London and New York.

• Music Games: Keep the Beat by Adam Borowski is a co-op 3D party game for up to 5 players that sends the song you build to Audiotool with its effects still wired up.
• Ideation: Pocket Producer by Wadood Ur Rehman Ranjha turns a song idea you describe into a full Audiotool arrangement with editable MIDI.
• Composition: Score IO by Josh Williams turns Audiotool note tracks into MusicXML and printable sheet music, and back again.
• Sound Design: BBCVerb by Jack Reynolds renders your audio through impulse responses measured at 80 chairs in BBC Maida Vale Studio 1.
• Connect: Seedbed by Diego Pinzon and Dan Thompson converts projects between Ableton Live and Audiotool in both directions.
• Distribution: A&R Assistant by Aina Hirata analyzes a track and writes a label-style A&R report about it.

One heads-up if you browse the full shortlist: there are 2 apps called Pocket Producer, and the winner is Ranjha’s.

How NEXUS turns a Let’s Build! app into an editable Audiotool project

So what does “built on NEXUS” mean for you? NEXUS lets an outside app read and write a live Audiotool session. Audiotool opened it as an API beta in January and made it public with Audiotool 3.0 in July.

In practice, the music doesn’t get stuck inside the app. You sign in with your Audiotool account, the app writes the tracks, MIDI and effects into a project, and you keep editing it in Audiotool, alone or live with other people.

Score IO, Seedbed and BBCVerb connect Audiotool to sheet music, Ableton and Maida Vale

If you already make music outside a browser, these 3 are the ones to open first.

Score IO solves a real session problem: getting a part to a live player. It exports your note tracks as MusicXML, and Williams wrote a heuristic that quantizes the small timing wobbles of a live performance into rhythms a player can read.

Seedbed is the one for Ableton Live users. Open a Live project as a new Audiotool project through Seedbed’s Ableton extension, and bring Audiotool projects back into Live with the arrangement rebuilt.

BBCVerb already exists as a plugin: Reynolds lists the BBC in London as his base, and the NEXUS app runs the same engine. You pick one of 80 measured chairs in Maida Vale Studio 1, home of the BBC Symphony Orchestra for 92 years, and your audio comes back as a new track with the room’s real decay.

Can A&R Assistant really estimate what a song will earn?

A&R Assistant, built by Aina Hirata at NYU on Base44, reads an Audiotool project and returns a full report. It scores commercial, viral and playlist potential, lists similar artists with a percentage match, predicts the audience and drafts a release plan.

“

This project shows a really strong understanding of the needs of an A&R today. It's something a lot of startups claim they can do, but often cannot.

Audiotool says it also estimates earning potential across streaming, touring and merch. Those numbers come from an AI model reading your track, so I’d use them to start your research, not to plan a budget.

Let’s Build! prizes, the 17 judges and the second edition in late 2026

Audiotool says the winners’ sponsor prizes are worth $10,000, including $1,000 in cash. Per its prizes page, each category winner gets $1,000 from Base44, $1,000 in Stripe fee credits and annual Base44 Pro, ChatGPT Pro and LANDR Studio Pro licenses.

The 17 judges came from Fraunhofer IDMT, Berklee, BBC R&D, Music Hackspace and LANDR, among others. Edward Fotheringham of BBC R&D singled out Keep the Beat for how it mixes gaming, music creation and education.

Audiotool co-founder and CEO Andreas Jacobi put it this way in the announcement: “We believe that vibecoding will extend the creative process for artists, increase the fun part and empower a new generation of creators.”

So if there’s a tool you’ve always wished existed, you don’t need to be a coder to build it. The second Let’s Build! starts in late 2026, and you can get on the list now.