ryolune is a complete DAW: record while you hear yourself through your effects, arrange, edit MIDI, mix on a real mixer and export stems, with 34 stock plugins and your own VST3, CLAP and Audio Units. When you would rather not quantise forty notes by hand, ask the built-in agent, or plug Claude Code, Codex or any MCP client straight into the song. It works on the same session, and every edit it makes is one undo away.
Version 0.11 · free and MIT licensed · macOS, Windows, Linux · no account, no subscription, no telemetry · pay what you want, once
A browser sketch of the window: Space plays, a marker jumps to its section (double-click loops it), M mutes and I cycles a track’s monitoring. The real thing is below.
New in 0.10
0.10 lets a song change tempo where the music asks for it, from a sudden half-time bridge to a slow ritardando, and gives the mixer buses of your own: group the drums under one fader, or send the vocals to a plate. As always, the agent, the CLI and MCP clients can do all of it too.
Show the tempo track under the ruler and click where the tempo should change. Drag a point to move it or retune it, or make it ramp from the tempo before for a ritardando or an accelerando. Notes, regions and markers stay on their bars; audio plays at its own speed through every change, and exports, the metronome and MIDI files follow.
Add a bus and route tracks to it from the Output menu: one fader and one compressor for the whole kit. Solo the group and its tracks stay with it.
Point any send at a bus of your own for a second reverb or a parallel crush, up to four sends a track. Plugin latency stays compensated through every bus.
“Slow down into the last chorus” and “group the drums and glue them” are commands the agent can run, each one undo step.
Import a multitimbral MIDI file as one track with every channel, and polyphonic aftertouch follows the notes when you jump around the song.
A plugin you own as CLAP, VST3 and AU loads as whichever you choose from its menu, and Audio Unit presets show which one is in use.
The actual window
Features
Arm a track, hear yourself through its effects and watch the level before you sing. A count-in clicks you in while the input opens, so the first word is never clipped. Name sections with markers and loop them; split, trim, fade, duplicate, copy and paste, and snap from whole bars to 1/64. Drop audio (WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, Ogg, AAC, CAF, even 5.1) or a MIDI file straight onto the window.
Piano roll, score and step views on the same notes, with a controller lane for mod wheel, sustain, pitch bend and pressure. Quantise, humanise, legato, velocity ramps, fit to scale and transpose, from the menu or ⌥↑ ⌥↓.
Fader, pan, mute, solo, arm, input monitoring and a live meter per channel, eight inserts a strip, reverb and delay returns, your own buses to group tracks or send them to, a master chain, clip gain and sample-accurate automation for any parameter.
Eleven instruments, from a polysynth, an electric piano and a tonewheel organ to an 808, an analog bass and a string ensemble. Twenty-three effects: compressor, EQ, tape, reverb, echo, de-esser, flanger, pitch shifter, lo-fi and a pump that ducks on the beat without sidechain routing. Each stock panel draws what it is doing from the same maths as the audio.
Hosts VST3, CLAP and macOS Audio Units, scanned in a separate process so one bad plugin cannot take the app down. One browser row per plugin, filed by sound with favourites and recents. State is saved inside the project.
Generate Euclidean grooves you can audition before committing. Keep up to eight protected variations of a session and flip between them A/B.
Mixes and aligned track stems as WAV (up to 96 kHz, or 32-bit float), AIFF, FLAC at 16 or 24-bit, or Ogg Vorbis. Export a selected range, or 960-PPQ MIDI, and import MIDI files the same way.
⌘P opens a command palette with every command by name. Single-key transport, tools and track toggles, and a shortcut sheet generated from the real bindings.
Rolling recovery snapshots, a recovered-take rescue for interrupted recordings, saves that never replace a good file with a bad one, and Ed25519-signed updates.
Every plugin you own is filed by what it does. One colour per sound family, from the browser to the front panel.
Themes, in the app
Pick the look you want to stare at for six hours, in Settings › Interface, or let the mode follow your system. Every theme is computed, not painted: one neutral ramp, one accent, and text contrast tested on every surface. This site keeps to Skeuomorphic dark, the one the app is designed from.
Modern. Flat and quiet. Depth from a five-step lightness ladder and one-pixel lines; a single accent; nothing glows.
Skeuomorphic. Milled hardware under one light from above. Graphite in the dark, champagne aluminium in the light, smoked-glass displays in both.
Frutiger Aero. Glass, water and sky. Lens buttons with a bright upper reflection, a daylight frame by day and an aurora by night.
Console. A warm analogue studio desk: walnut cheeks, brass controls and amber meters, after dark or by day.
Ink. Paper and ink. Flat, crisp type and lines, and a single red accent for the playhead, record and focus.
Neon. Violet glass lit from inside, with magenta and cyan light on the playhead, meters and focus.
Material system
Every control is built from a handful of material recipes: raised, pressed, lit, groove, well, knob, fader cap. A theme does not redraw them, it re-lights them. Skeuomorphic gives each one a specular edge, a darkening face, a contact line and a soft drop; Modern keeps only the line; Aero turns the face into a lens. These are the Skeuomorphic ones. Turn the knob, ride the fader.
Agent
The agent panel streams its reply while it works and shows one card per command it runs. It uses the model you already pay for: Codex or Claude Code from their CLIs, an Anthropic or OpenAI key, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including a local one. Nothing leaves your machine unless you connect a provider.
/beat, /chords, /humanize, /mix, /arrange, /diagnose and more, or plain language.Command layer
The desktop window, command-line tool, MCP server and built-in agent share more than 180 validated commands for sessions, transport, tracks, notes, plugins, presets, automation, settings, exports, the clipboard and the interface itself. Agent edits use the same undo history as manual edits. Native dialogs and plugin windows remain interface controls.
The window’s button dispatches track.setMute through the command store. Persistent edits share the session’s undo and redo history.
$ ryolune-cli track.setMute --trackId bgv --muted false ok session 3f9c · undo #12
The CLI is generated from the command registry, not hand-written. New command in core, new subcommand in the shell.
{
"name": "track_setMute",
"arguments": { "trackId": "bgv", "muted": false }
}
MCP tools expose the same parameter schemas, plus prompts and resources for settings, plugins and presets. The built-in agent uses the same tools with Codex CLI, Claude Code CLI, an Anthropic or OpenAI key or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint; prompts and tool results go to the provider you choose.
These examples reflect the browser preview’s store. Mute BGV above and watch the displayed values follow.
Architecture
ryolune’s desktop window, CLI, MCP server and built-in agent share a Rust command registry and session store. The window is a Tauri 2 shell with a React renderer in the system WebView; the session, undo history, plugins and the real-time audio callback stay in Rust, and no audio runs in JavaScript.
dispatch(command)
Rust session model · validated edits · shared history
--agent. Every agent edit can be undone from the Changes tab.Switching
No DAW reads another DAW’s project files, and ryolune does not pretend to. Here is what comes with you, what is better on this side, and what is not here yet, so you can decide with the facts.
If your work depends on one of these, keep your current DAW for that job and try ryolune for writing and arranging.
Changelog
Each release must pass the engine tests and a scripted full-song session on all four platforms before it ships. The full notes, with checksums, are on GitHub releases.
.ondera files open as they are.Time stretching, take comping, time signature changes inside a song and MP3 export are not built yet; buses do not feed other buses. No VST2 or AAX. External plugin editors open on macOS only. Windows and Linux windows are built and tested in CI but not yet checked by hand. macOS packages are notarized; Windows binaries are not code-signed yet.
FAQ
Yes. ryolune is MIT licensed, with no paid tier, account or track limit. If it earns a place in your music you can pay what you want for it, once; nothing unlocks when you do. The agent uses whichever model provider you connect, and that provider may charge you; the DAW works fully without one.
There will not be a subscription. Paying once is how ryolune keeps being built full time: it pays for the Apple signing account, the test machines and the hours. ryolune asks once in the app, after your third export, and never again. Building from source is and stays free.
No. The agent stays idle and nothing is sent anywhere until you connect a provider and send a prompt. Every feature on this page except the agent works offline.
Yes. Set the monitor button beside Arm to Auto or On and you hear the input through the track’s inserts and fader. Use headphones: with the built-in microphone and the built-in speakers together, ryolune keeps monitoring muted so it cannot feed back, until you choose Monitor Anyway. A smaller buffer in Settings > Audio means less delay, and ryolune shows the latency it measured.
WAV (16 or 24-bit, or 32-bit float), AIFF, FLAC (16 or 24-bit) and Ogg Vorbis, for the whole song, a range or one file per track, plus MIDI files. MP3 is not built: there is no MP3 encoder yet that fits the project’s licence and build, so Ogg Vorbis covers small files for now.
VST3 and CLAP plugins load on macOS, Windows and Linux, and Audio Units on macOS, as long as they match your processor architecture. VST2 and AAX are not supported. Native plugin editor windows currently open on macOS only; elsewhere you get ryolune’s generic parameter panel. Native ryolune plugins built for an older version keep loading.
Yes. Mod wheel, sustain, pitch bend and pressure reach the instrument while you play, are recorded into the clip, and show up in the controller lane under the piano roll, where you can draw or fix them.
No, and no other DAW can either. Export stems and MIDI from the old project and import them. It takes a few minutes per song.
From 0.11 ryolune is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other app. Ondera 0.10 and older, from before the rename, cannot update themselves to ryolune: download it once from this page.
It is a young 0.x project. Each release must pass the engine tests and a scripted full-song session (record, edit, save, reopen, export) on all four platforms before it ships, and recovery snapshots run in the background. Keep backups, as with any DAW.
Only what the permission switches in Settings allow. By default it can edit the session, import and export files and run the transport; replacing the session, changing settings and controlling the app are off until you turn them on. Each is its own switch. Whatever it changes is in your undo history.
Support
ryolune is built by one person and costs nothing. If it earns a place in your music, choose a price and pay it one time. Everyone gets the same app either way.
Free and MIT licensed, pay what you want if it helps. Archives include the ryolune-cli and ryolune-mcp companions, and the app updates itself from signed releases.
Release notes and checksums Build from source Report a problem
git clone https://github.com/ludovic111/ryolune.git && cd ryolune && npm --prefix frontend ci && npm --prefix frontend run build && cargo run --release