Whyp.it alternative: how PasteWaves compares
If you’re a hobbyist musician looking for a quieter alternative to SoundCloud, two tools that show up in the same search are Whyp.it and PasteWaves. We get asked how we compare, so here’s an honest answer.
Both products solve the same broad problem: you want to share a track with a friend, a bandmate, or a small audience without wading through SoundCloud’s monetization push, follower counts, or 3-hour-per-month upload cap. Both keep your files private by default. Both give you a real audio player at a real URL.
So what’s actually different?
Four things PasteWaves does that Whyp doesn’t
| Feature | Whyp.it | PasteWaves |
|---|---|---|
| Anonymous upload (no account required) | ❌ | ✅ |
| Browser-based audio recording | ❌ | ✅ |
| Browser-based audio editor (trim, fades, bass) | ❌ | ✅ |
| Multi-file upload | Single file at a time | ✅ |
A few words on each, because a checkmark in a table doesn’t tell the whole story.
1. Anonymous upload
You can drag a file onto pastewaves.com and get a shareable link without creating an account. No email, no password, no Google sign-in, no “verify your address.” Anonymous uploads stick around for 7 days, which is plenty for sending a rough mix to a friend.
Whyp requires an account before you can upload anything. That’s a defensible product choice — it gives them a profile graph to build on — but it’s friction we deliberately avoid.
2. Browser-based audio recording
Open PasteWaves, click Record, talk or play into your microphone, get a link. No download, no install, no app. We have separate Voice and Music modes because what works for a podcast pitch doesn’t work for a guitar take. (We wrote about the engineering tradeoffs here if you’re curious.)
Whyp doesn’t have an in-browser recorder.
3. Browser-based audio editor
After you upload (or record) a track, you can open it in PasteWaves’ built-in editor and trim it, add fade-in/fade-out, boost the volume, or apply a bass-boost filter. It runs entirely in your browser using the Web Audio API — no servers, no plugins, no FFmpeg.wasm download.
Whyp doesn’t have an editor. If you need to trim a track before sharing it, you do that somewhere else first.
4. Multi-file upload
Drag a folder of takes onto PasteWaves and we’ll upload all of them in parallel. Pick ten files in the file dialog and they all go up in one sitting.
Whyp’s interface uploads one file at a time.
Where Whyp wins
We’re trying to be honest here, not score points. Whyp has been around longer and there are real things they do better than us today:
- FLAC uncompressed audio on Pro. If you care about bit-perfect lossless playback, Whyp Pro offers FLAC; PasteWaves Pro tops out at 320kbps MP3.
- Mobile apps. Whyp has native iOS and Android apps. PasteWaves is web-only — it works fine in a mobile browser, but there’s no app in the store.
- Followers and following. If you want a small social graph around your tracks, Whyp has one. PasteWaves deliberately doesn’t — we’re trying to be the quiet alternative, not a smaller SoundCloud.
If any of those three matter to you, Whyp is probably the better fit.
Pricing
PasteWaves Pro is $5/month (or $48/year) for 25GB of permanent storage and 320kbps MP3. Whyp Pro is more expensive at the time of writing — check their site for current numbers, since pricing changes.
Who PasteWaves is for
We’re built for the hobbyist musician who wants to share a track with people, not the internet. Bandmates, a producer friend, a small mailing list, a Discord. No algorithm, no follower count, no “engagement” pressure, no ads.
If that’s you, give us a try — you don’t need an account to start.