The MusicStudio Project

A Digital Audio Workstation written from scratch.

About

Roughly speaking, the goal of this project is to create DAW similar in look and feel to FL Studio, since I've found myself very productive in it. This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like.

It currently only works on macOS.

Screenshots

Features

• VST2 support
• WASM plugins
• Instant reloading of both ui and audio code

Build instructions

This project is only tested to compile with the clang compiler on macOS. You will need to install it, by running xcode-select install in the terminal after which you will need to run the bootstrap command. This will build all the software needed in the build process, which will take a while, so just grab the beverage of your choice and enjoy the hum of your computer fans :)

Prerequisites

xcode-select install

Setup: (bootstrap the toolchain)

eval $(./bootstrap)

Build: (this is the command to run when rebuilding)

ninja -C build

After building, the MusicStudio executable will be found in ./build/bin/music-studio.

Goals

1. Reliability
2. Executable performance
3. Fast hot reload of all the things
4. Zero dependencies
5. Fun!

Reliability

To make MusicStudio reliable, we try to keep ourselves to using the NASA/JPL Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code:

• Avoid complex flow constructs, such as goto and recursion.
• All loops must have fixed bounds. This prevents runaway code.
• Avoid heap memory allocation after initialization.
• Restrict functions to a single printed page.
• Use a minimum of two runtime assertions per function.
• Restrict the scope of data to the smallest possible.
• Check the return value of all non-void functions, or cast to void to indicate the return value is useless.
• Use the preprocessor only for header files and simple macros.
• Limit pointer use to a single dereference, and do not use function pointers.
• Compile with all possible warnings active; all warnings should then be addressed before release of the software.

Fast hot reload of all the things

When tweaking UI/Audio algorithms, a tight feedback loop is required for a great developer experience. Therefore, MusicStudio is built from the ground up with code reloading in mind. This means that there are a few things to keep in mind while writing code.

• Keep the structs and functions ABI stable, this means that if you add a field to a structure, it should probably be at the end, and we rarely remove fields at all. The ty_trans_migrate() macro will ensure that the new fields are initialized to zero when they've been added.

• Don't send (function) pointers between threads unless you're sure that the pointer would be valid after a code swap. Instead, send all the data to the other thread via THMessageQueue.

Zero dependencies

MusicStudio wants to be a zero dependency program, everything should be built in-house, since that way we can ensure that the code is real-time safe and the full stack integration of the code base nicer and makes the project easier to build. There are a couple exceptions to this rule, namely STB libraries and (at the moment) libsoundio.