What They Built: Audiotool Unveils Winners of First Let’s Build! Hackathon
Audiotool’s Let’s Build! hackathon series gave everyone a chance to build the music apps they’d always wanted. Now, it’s presenting the winners to the world.
Let’s Build! brought together more than 2,000 university students, developers, music makers, and many others at community events around the world, both in person and remotely. The hackathon enabled any participant to create applications, also with AI assistance, and build their dream app. Through the Audiotool NEXUS protocol, these apps become multiplayer and connected to Audiotool, the pioneering digital audio workstation that hosted the global hackathon.
A panel of expert judges then voted on community-made music tools spanning six categories; Music Games, Ideation, Composition, Sound Design, Connect, and Distribution. Each app was created with NEXUS, the open-source SDK that Audiotool introduced to their online studio just a few months ago.
THE LET’S BUILD! WINNERS
Music Games & Interactive Experiences: Keep the Beat by Adam Borowski
A multiplayer 3D game where players collect Audiotool loops, add effects, and mix them on a turntable. Every track exports to Audiotool with its effects already wired up, so the music made in the game becomes a real, editable production.
Ideation: Pocket Producer by Wadood Ur Rehman Ranjha
An AI agent that producers can talk to about a song idea, anytime and anywhere, which turns the conversation into a full Audiotool arrangement with editable MIDI tracks, ready when they’re back in the studio.
Composition: Score IO by Josh Williams
The judges’ only unanimous pick. Score IO turns Audiotool projects into printable sheet music and MusicXML, and brings MusicXML back into Audiotool, connecting traditional notation with online music production.
Sound Design: BBCVerb by Jack Reynolds
Captures the acoustics of the BBC’s legendary Maida Vale studios, where artists from the Beatles to David Bowie recorded, from around 80 positions in the room. Producers can place their sound anywhere in the space, preserving a piece of music history.
Connect: Seedbed by Diego Pinzon and Dan Thompson
Bridges Ableton Live and Audiotool by converting projects in both directions, making collaboration between producers on different DAWs seamless.
Distribution & Marketing: A&R Assistant by Aina Hirata
An AI-powered A&R that analyzes a track, identifies similar artists, and estimates its earning potential across streaming, touring, and merch, giving independent artists industry-level insight into their music.
Let’s Build! suggests the future of music creation where, thanks to AI-assisted coding, anyone is able to turn ideas into working multiplayer apps. Tools will not be pre-made for producers, musicians, and creators to learn to live with. They will be adaptable and carefully adapted to specific use cases and experiences. Everyone can now build their own tools with AI, something far more impactful for the music creation industry than AI-generated music.
“We are impressed by the variety and creativity of all the entries. You can see how the creators of these apps really saw a problem or opportunity, and then addressed it ingeniously,” notes Andreas Jacobi, co-founder and CEO of Audiotool. “We believe that vibecoding will extend the creative process for artists, increase the fun part and empower a new generation of creators.”
AI Music Researcher Rithik Kundu, who also hosted a Let’s Build! in-person hackathon at NYU, praised A&R Assistant, which won the Distribution category: “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.”
Edward Fotheringham, Product Principal at BBC Future World Design / R&D, noted that the quality of submissions was very impressive and called out the winner of the Games category “Keep the Beat” on how deftly the app bridges gamification, music creation, and education.
Prof. Nicole Loeser of Jiangsu University of Science and Technology & SRH Berlin University of Applied Sciences and also a judge, thanked Let’s Build! for the inspiration and creative space that it opened up for young people to experiment, build and bring their ideas to life.
All 18 apps that made the cut for the shortlist can be explored on the Let’s Build! website.
The Let’s Build! Hackathon was supported by university partners including NYU, Munich Music Labs, Hawai’i Pacific University, Queen Mary University London, Berklee College of Music, MTSU, and Monash University. Industry partners included ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Stripe, Base44, Fraunhofer Institute, BBC R&D, LANDR, Splice, Ujam, Music Hackspace, 2WEI, BandM8, Music Hub and Safari Pedals.
The winners will receive prizes from sponsors worth $10,000, including $1,000 in cash. The second edition of Let’s Build! kicks off in late 2026. Sign up here for updates and info.
About Audiotool
Audiotool is a free, browser-based multiplayer music production platform with a global, active community that has created over 1 million published tracks and more than 500,000 collaborations. Built for real-time co-creation from the ground up, Audiotool recently launched NEXUS, the first open developer platform for collaborative music production, giving developers, AI tools, and music apps full read/write access to live DAW sessions.
