Axion is one person's answer to a recurring frustration: that picking up a guitar at a friend's place, on a hotel desk, or after a fresh OS reinstall should not require a 4 GB plugin install, an iLok login, and a license-server handshake.
I started building Axion in early 2026 after going through the same dance for the fifth time in the past few years: new laptop, fresh OS, two hours of installers, three failed activations, a forgotten password, and then finally — finally — a few seconds of tone before my afternoon disappeared. There had to be a version of this that started with a URL.
The browser used to be the wrong place for this. It isn't anymore. AudioWorklets give us real-time DSP at the buffer level. WebAssembly lets a NAM model run at a fraction of a percent of CPU. WebMIDI hands us controllers without driver installers. The pieces have been here for a year; what was missing was someone willing to commit to the boring, dogged work of putting them together with respect for the user's expertise.
So Axion is direct. No tutorial overlay between you and the gain knob. No marketing screen between you and the cab. Knobs that move the way knobs move. A signal flow you can read. Honest models with names you recognise, sitting next to NAM captures because we know which one you really want.
It's also small on purpose. The free tier is generous because there is no investor pushing for a conversion rate. Pro is a one-time payment because if I die or quit, the build you have keeps working — the EULA says so. Cloud is the only subscription, and it exists because storage costs me money; you pay if you want to pay me to store your stuff.
If you're curious what else I'm building: there's a record coming out called Djentle Singularity, made largely in Axion's beta, releasing on a new device called Fonix One — it ships on every unit sold. The whole story is here if you want it.
If you'd like to tell me what's wrong with it, please do: hi@axion.cab. I read everything.
— Alopex, somewhere with a laptop and a beer at the ready
Audio enters via WebAudio's getUserMedia off your selected interface, gets handed to a custom AudioWorklet running compiled Rust DSP (WebAssembly SIMD when your browser supports it, scalar otherwise), and exits through the same audio graph back to your output device. The DSP is single-block-per-callback - no scheduling, no buffering above what the OS already imposes. Round-trip is whatever your interface plus driver gives you, plus a few hundred samples.
NAM captures are loaded as static graph weights; we transpile them to a stack-allocated forward pass on first load and cache the compiled module in IndexedDB. After the first time you load a capture, it boots in under 80 ms (hopefully).
Presets are JSON (about 2 KB each) and live in localStorage on the free tier. Shared presets get a content-addressed slug and live on a small static CDN; the server holds no state about you.
Axion ships 51 impulse responses — 14 cabinet IRs and 37 reverb spaces — all released under permissive open licenses (CC0 or CC BY 4.0). The summary below groups them by upstream source; expand any row for the full per-IR list. The in-app About modal (Settings → About) shows the same data with direct links to every source recording.
Tap a row to expand the per-IR list. If you spot a missing attribution or a mis-credit, please email hi@axion.cab — we will correct it within a working day.
Axion is built on open-source software. The full list of components and their licenses — generated from the live dependency graph — is published here: open-source licenses ↗. The same notice ships inside every Axion build (Settings → About).
VST® is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH, registered in Europe and other countries. ASIO is a trademark and software of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH. NAM support is an independent implementation of the open Neural Amp Modeler format created by Steven Atkinson.
Bug reports, feature requests, license trouble, and tone questions all welcome at the same address. There is one person on the other end and they reply.
