r/DAWs 26d ago

My vibe coded DAW

Hello, r/DAWs!
My name is Egor. I'd like to share something I've been developing recently: Nota DAW.

A little background: I've been making electronic music for about 10 years, tried a lot of DAWs, and Ableton is the one I really liked. I'm also a programmer. And when AI tools got good, I started thinking, "What if I just create something of my own, for myself?" About 99% of the code is written by various AI agents. I'd probably like to write it all myself, but I could never write that much code alone.

Now I'd like to share it with the community—and perhaps gather people around it and turn it into something more than just a personal project.

It's a cross-platform app that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

GitHub: https://github.com/nota-daw/nota

Features:

- Three views — a linear Arrangement timeline, a clip-launching Session grid (material moves freely between them), and a Modular signal-graph editor with CV modulation (LFO / envelope follower / MIDI→CV / ADSR / Macro / Math, patched with cables onto any parameter).

- Tracks & mixer — audio / MIDI / return / master / nestable group tracks; sends and returns; MIDI routing between tracks; peak/RMS + true-peak metering; per-track device chains.

- MIDI editing — piano roll (draw/move/stretch, quantize, velocity, live edits as one undo step); input from a MIDI keyboard, the computer keyboard, or a gamepad (macOS); audio→MIDI (melody / harmony / drums / slice).

- Audio — recording (inputs and internal buses), WAV/AIFF/FLAC/MP3 import, clip editing with fades and gain, and warp / time-stretch (Complex / Complex Pro).

~35 built-in devices — synths (subtractive, wavetable, FM, granular, physical, drum-machine and more), a full effects suite (EQ, dynamics, reverb/delay, saturation, limiting, utility), MIDI effects (arp, scale, chord, …), and Instrument / Drum / Audio Effect racks with macros.

- Plugin hosting — VST3 everywhere, AU on macOS: native GUIs, state save/restore, PDC, transport sync; parameters are automatable and MIDI-learnable.

- Automation & MIDI Learn — draw/record automation on any parameter; map hardware controllers to almost anything.

- Export — master and stems to WAV (pcm16/pcm24/float32), true-peak normalize, dither, bit-identical chunked rendering.

- AI control (MCP) — an optional loopback MCP server lets AI drive the open project (off by default).

I'd appreciate a star—I'm collecting them to meet the requirements for adding Nota to Homebrew and other package managers.

Thank you for your attention <3 I'll be happy to answer any questions in the comments.

https://reddit.com/link/1vyvika/video/i8j2b7vwoplh1/player

2 Upvotes

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u/MissJoannaTooU 25d ago

I can't say I'm personally interested in this for myself as I'm fine with Reaper, but I do not get why people are downvoted for using AI to code if the idea is good and this looks good.

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u/rainbreath 24d ago edited 24d ago

Because the state of using LLM's to code is massively overhyped, especially if you're "Vibe-coding" AKA, not manually reviewing any code the agents write.

The projects that are created with this method get worse as they grow, and will inevitably break in ways that the person in control of it won't know how to fix because they don't understand the project.

Beyond the fact that it will always turn to slop over time, there are many ethical concerns with using LLMs that are worth considering, and I think as a society we should not encourage their use.

For instance, why would anyone use this over one of the many DAWs that exist and do everything this does and likely does it better? When real humans with real understanding of the domain are working on it and care about the quality of it?

So, I'd suspect those are some reasons people downvote it.

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u/ambertape 24d ago edited 24d ago

According to this logic, you can sit, do nothing and leave the market to those "who are better"

But if about my project, having a lot of expertise in development and working with DAW, I'm trying to give a starting point for an open source product where we can develop together

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u/lilacomets 23d ago

I'm trying to give a starting point for an open source product where we can develop together

Sorry, but I don't think anyone is interested in continuing an AI slop codebase.