About this project

Futureboard Studio is the Community Edition of an open-source digital audio workstation, released under the MIT License and currently in a pre-alpha state. The project explicitly warns that it is under active early development, with breaking changes, incomplete features and no persistence guarantees; it is not intended for production or irreplaceable projects. The primary maintained surface is a native Rust application built on GPUI, the rendering framework behind the Zed editor, driving an in-process Rust audio engine. A secondary web surface uses React, TypeScript, Vite and a WebAssembly DSP core; it shares layout and engine concepts but may lag behind the native client. Core crates include SphereDirectAudioEngine for native low-latency audio (WASAPI, CoreAudio, ALSA), SphereWebAudioCore for the web WASM audio core (transport, graph, mixer, meters, DSP), SphereUIComponents for the native GPUI UI kit, SpherePluginHost for plugin scanning and hosting (VST3, CLAP, AU, legacy VST2), and SphereAudioPlugins for built-in real-time DSP such as EQ, compression and delay. Additional directories cover stock plugin editors, modules like noise removal and stem extraction, extension templates, shared assets and vendored SDKs. Prerequisites are Bun, Rust 1.85+ with the wasm32-unknown-unknown target, CMake 3.20+ and a C++ toolchain. Vendored SDKs are git submodules, so cloning requires --recursive. Development commands include bun run dev:native, dev:web and dev:server; native builds use cargo build -p futureboard_native, and packaging scripts produce macOS .app/.dmg and Windows portable or installer bundles. macOS universal builds are assembled by packaging each architecture and merging with lipo. Platform audio backends are WASAPI on Windows, CoreAudio on macOS and ALSA on Linux. Several environment variables expose verbose logging for plugin, view and routing diagnostics. The roadmap targets a stable native GPUI shell, audio clip and MIDI editing, mixer routing, native plugin hosting, a project file format, automation lanes, audio export and cross-platform packaging. Translations are managed through Crowdin, and the repository includes contribution, design and trademark policies; Professional Edition components are separately licensed and not part of this public repository.