Back in December, my Tascam DP-24 (with MIDI) died.
That machine helped me get things done. Not because it was powerful, but because it wasn't. No infinite plugin chains, no unlimited tracks, no menus buried inside menus (well, a few). Just the basics to record, mix and master a song. Those limitations made me actually finish songs instead of tweaking them forever. When I sit in front of a modern DAW, I often record a guitar track and then play with plugins for an hour and getting nothing accomplished. If you're like me and struggle with option paralysis, or have ADHD, I'm sure you can relate.
When the DP-24 gave out, I went looking for software that felt the same way. Nothing did. Every DAW out there wants to be everything at once. So I started building the one I actually wanted, and that's Dusk Studio: a deliberately constrained, portastudio-style DAW.
The whole thing comes down to one question: will this keep me focused and force me to finish a song? If the answer is no, it doesn't get built.
This is early alpha
Please keep your expectations low but have fun with the program. Things might not work, UI weirdness for screen resolutions and other strange things I haven't caught yet. Think of this as a "watch it grow" release, not a "replace your DAW" release. If you need something rock solid today, this isn't it yet.
Known rough edges right now:
The mastering stage "mostly" works, but it's the least-tested part and the UI still needs a lot of love. The mastering limiter currently doesn't work properly.
The hardware-insert latency ping hasn't been fully tested against real outboard gear yet. I plan to hook up my ART PRO VLA II next week and do more testing there.
Session handling is solid (atomic saves, auto-save, crash recovery) but still getting polished.
The manual is not great.
If you want to fund this and help shape it from the ground up, here's the plan.
The deal (the Ardour model)
Dusk Studio's code will always be open source and always free. If you'd rather compile it yourself, the source link is at the bottom. Go for it.
What will be for sale is the compiled builds: $27 for every platform at the 1.0 production release. Until we get there, I'll be posting builds here on Patreon as development moves along, and every paying patron gets every build, all the way to 1.0.
So a minimum of $1 a month gets you the builds all the way to production, and it directly funds helping me get this finished.
Everyone backing during the alpha is a Founding Patron: your name will go in Dusk Studio's About panel, permanently, same as I do for the plugins.
Start here
📦 Become a patron & get every build
⬇️ Download the current alpha build: At the bottom
🐛 Report bugs / follow along: https://github.com/dusk-audio/dusk-studio/discussions
🔧 Source code: https://github.com/dusk-audio/dusk-studio
What it actually does
Recording and tracking. You get 24 tracks of audio or MIDI, laid out in three banks of 8 so it maps cleanly onto a real control surface. Each track has Arm, Input-monitor, and Print modes, and Print commits the channel's EQ, compressor, and insert straight into the recorded file. Punch in and out is sample-accurate with pre-roll, post-roll, and automatic crossfades so you never get a click at the boundary. There's loop recording and a count-in. Every region keeps up to 20 takes, so punching in creates a new take automatically and you can cycle through them or grab one from a badge right on the region.
The mixer. The signal chain is fixed and it's the same on every track: phase invert, then an insert slot (a plugin or a piece of outboard hardware), high-pass filter, 4-band EQ, low-pass filter, compressor, sends, pan, fader, routing. The compressor gives you three characters (optical, FET, and VCA), each with its own controls and its own remembered settings. Every channel has 4 aux sends (switchable pre or post fader) feeding 4 aux buses, and each bus has its own 3-band EQ, compressor, and fader. The master chain runs program EQ into a bus compressor into tape saturation, with a mono-check button and proper metering. You also get mute, solo-in-place, and 8 fader groups that move together while keeping their relative balance.
MIDI. There's a full piano roll where you draw, move, and trim notes, with a velocity lane, CC lanes, quantize, scale highlighting, glue, and humanize. A built-in sampler means you can drop an .sfz or .sf2 file onto any MIDI track and play it with no external synth involved. There's an on-screen keyboard for entering chords quickly, MIDI Learn on just about every control, and Mackie Control surface support (tested against my Nektar T6). It also syncs over MTC and MIDI Clock as either master or slave (not fully tested yet).
Editing and automation. Region editing is non-destructive: trim, fade with five different curve shapes, gain, split, normalize, and join. Basic zoom in/out and fit region to editor. Automation is console-style, with Off, Read, Write, and Touch modes. You ride the fader and it captures the move. You can also draw curves in the editor and drop named markers on the fly by pressing M and jump between them.
Plugins and hardware. It hosts VST3 everywhere, LV2 on Linux, and AU on macOS. CLAP will come later. Plugins run out of process (sandboxed), so a plugin that crashes just bypasses its own slot instead of taking the whole app down with it. Hardware inserts have an auto-latency ping that measures the round-trip delay through your outboard gear and time-aligns the rest of the mix for you.
Mastering and export. The goal is to click through each tab at the top as you work: You record, then mix, then create a mixdown and master. The dedicated mastering stage has a 5-band EQ, a multiband compressor, and a brickwall limiter, plus LUFS and true-peak metering and target presets for the streaming platforms. When you're done you can bounce the full mix, do a quick mixdown, master, or export stems with one WAV per track.
Sessions. Everything is folder-based with atomic saves and a 30-second auto-save with crash recovery, so it won't lose your takes. There are starter templates too: Band, Beats, Singer-Songwriter, or just Blank. Sessions are currently just .json, but I might update them to .studio or something a bit "fancier" in the future.
Platforms. It runs on Linux (PipeWire, JACK, or ALSA, with recovery when a USB interface gets unplugged), macOS (CoreAudio), and Windows (ASIO recommended). Built on JUCE 8 and C++17.
Please note that the binaries are unsigned for Mac and Windows, so they will yell at you the first time to try to run the program saying that it may not be safe. If this turns out to be a successful DAW, I will pay the "Apple Tax" for a developer license and get a cert for Windows.
Thanks for being here this early. I am a few days late posting this, but I am looking forward to everyone using it and watching it grow!
Marc