opendaw

openDAW is a web-based Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that runs in the browser. The project states its goals as democratizing music production, making high-quality creation tools accessible, and emphasizing education and data privacy. It is released under AGPL v3 (or later), with an alternative commercial license for closed-source or license-incompatible use. Privacy and simplicity are explicit design points: the README lists no signup, no tracking, no cookie banners, no user profiling, no terms and conditions, no ads, no paywalls and no data mining. Core capabilities described in the repository: - A studio application with a timeline, track management, mixer and device-based signal routing. - A large stock device set, including synthesizers (Vaporisateur subtractive synth, Neon phase-distortion synth, Cubed acid bass with step sequencer), samplers (Nano, Playfield drum computer, Soundfont player), and a programmable instrument (Apparat) and MIDI effect (Spielwerk) scripted in JavaScript. - Effects such as Convolver, Dattorro Reverb, Free Reverb, Delay, Crusher, Fold, Waveshaper, Maximizer, Gate, Vocoder, Autotune pitch correction, Revamp equalizer with spectrum analyser, Frequency Split, Stereo Split, Stereo Tool, Tidal, Velocity, Pitch, Zeitgeist, Composite and FX Composite. - A Tape playback device for audio regions and clips, plus MIDI Output for sending MIDI to other devices. - Tone3000 amplifier and effects modeling via Neural Amp Modeler, and a ported CTAG Dynamic Range Compressor (excluded from the commercial license). Architecture and tooling: the web studio deliberately avoids external frameworks and lists only a small set of dependencies (jszip, markdown-it, d3-force, soundfont2, zod, ffmpeg.wasm). The audio engine is a Rust/WASM package (@opendaw/studio-core-wasm), requiring a nightly Rust toolchain with rust-src and the wasm32-unknown-unknown target; binaryen/wasm-opt is optional for size optimization. Development requires Node.js >= 23, Git, mkcert, OpenSSL, Sass and TypeScript. Typical commands are npm run cert, npm install, npm run build, and npm run dev:studio or npm run dev:headless, with the dev server on https://localhost:8080. Related repositories include openDAW-headless (SDK) and a community fork with additional documentation and examples. The README also mentions a 1.0 release meetup in Cologne and a newsletter. Contribution guidance asks for small, focused pull requests that follow existing conventions; AI-assisted code is permitted but contributors must understand every line they submit and document AI usage in /plans. Areas explicitly seeking help include an offline desktop app (for example via Tauri), PWA/offline support, and timeline track management UX.