nota-daw/nota

A free music studio for macOS, Windows and Linux.
No subscription, no account, no feature tiers — just open it and make music.

▶ Watch the demo with sound (1:45, YouTube)

• Free, for good. Open source, no paid edition, no "upgrade to unlock".
• Arrange and jam. A linear Arrangement timeline and a clip-launching Session grid, with material moving freely between them — plus a Modular view for patching modulation by cable.
• A full kit out of the box. ~35 built-in instruments and effects: subtractive, wavetable, FM, granular and physical-modelling synths, a drum machine, EQ, compressors, reverbs, delays, saturation, arpeggiator, chord and scale tools, racks with macros.
• Your plugins too. VST3 on every platform, Audio Units on macOS. Popular free plugins (Surge XT, Dexed, Dragonfly Reverb …) install in one click from Settings.
• Your phone is a controller. Scan a QR code and play pads, keys and an XY pad, or ride the mixer — over Wi-Fi or USB, nothing to install.
• Works where you do. The same app on macOS, Windows and Linux, on Intel/AMD and ARM.

Arrangement — the song, with the selected track's devices below	Modular — patch LFOs and modulators onto any parameter
Piano roll — draw, then arpeggiate, strum or ornament in one click	Built-in devices — every one draws what it does to the sound
Mixer — faders, sends and live meters	Downloads — 200+ free open-source plugins, one click to install
…and a light theme, for daytime sessions.

A quick digest — see FEATURES.md for the full, categorised list.

• Three views — Arrangement timeline, Session clip grid, and a Modular signal-graph editor with CV modulation (LFO / envelope follower / MIDI→CV / ADSR / Macro / Math, patched onto any parameter).
• Tracks & mixer — audio, MIDI, group (nestable), return and master tracks; sends; MIDI routing between tracks; peak/RMS and true-peak meters.
• MIDI — piano roll with quantize and velocity; play from a MIDI keyboard, the computer keyboard, a gamepad (macOS) or your phone; drag in .mid files; turn audio into MIDI (melody / harmony / drums / slice).
• Audio — record from inputs and internal buses; import WAV/AIFF/FLAC/MP3; fades, gain and per-clip envelopes; warp / time-stretch.
• Automation & MIDI Learn — draw or record automation on any parameter; map hardware knobs to almost anything.
• Browser — preview presets, drum kits, effects and samples before you load them.
• Version history — every save is kept; go back to any earlier version of a song, or branch off from it.
• Export — the master or stems to WAV (16/24-bit or 32-bit float), with true-peak normalize and dither.
• AI control (optional) — a local MCP server lets an AI assistant such as Claude work in the open project. Off by default.

Download the file for your system from the latest release:

Nota isn't signed with a paid Apple or Microsoft certificate yet, so the system asks you to confirm the first time:

• macOS — see Opening Nota on macOS below.
• Windows — if SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC", click More info → Run anyway.
• Linux — make the AppImage executable (chmod +x Nota-*.AppImage, or Properties → Permissions in your file manager) and run it.

1. Open the downloaded .dmg and drag Nota into Applications.
2. Open Nota from Applications. The first time, macOS stops it with "Nota" Not Opened — Apple could not verify "Nota" is free of malware… (older macOS: "Nota" can't be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software). Click Done — not Move to Trash.
3. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and scroll down to Security. You'll see "Nota" was blocked to protect your Mac. Click Open Anyway, confirm with your password or Touch ID, then click Open Anyway once more.

That's it — from now on Nota opens like any other app.

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Nota.app

Why the extra step? Signing an app so macOS trusts it right away needs a paid Apple developer certificate, which Nota doesn't have yet. Nota is open source and built in public by GitHub Actions from the code in this repository.

Nota checks for updates itself and shows what's new after each update.

New to Nota? The user manual (English and Russian) walks through every view and device.

Nota is young and moving fast — new releases come out every week or so (see the changelog). It's already used to make real music, but expect rough edges. Found a bug or missing something? Open an issue — every report gets read. Want to help with code? Start with a good first issue. Development here is spec-driven: non-trivial changes start as a written spec in specs/ — requirements, plan and tasks before any code — following the Spec Kit workflow in CONTRIBUTING.md. Questions, ideas or music to share? Join the Discord server.

Nota has its own plugin registry — nota-daw/nota-plugins-registry — the list of open-source VST3 plugins that Nota installs from Settings → Downloads. Add yours with a pull request and every Nota user can install it in one click; the registry's README explains what gets in and how.

The audio engine and DSP are a portable C++20 core; the UI is .NET 10 / Avalonia 12 (C#); plugin hosting runs through JUCE, isolated in its own module so the engine core stays JUCE-free.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/nota-daw/nota.git
cd nota
scripts/build.sh            # macOS; scripts/build-linux.sh on Linux, scripts/build-win.ps1 on Windows
dotnet run --project src/managed/Nota.App

• BUILD.md — prerequisites per platform, manual builds, packaging installers and AppImages.
• ARCHITECTURE.md — how the engine, the C ABI and the app fit together.
• CONTRIBUTING.md — contributing, licensing your work, and the real-time rules.
• specs/ — the spec-driven development workflow for non-trivial changes; see CONTRIBUTING.md and the worked example in specs/000-example/.

Nota is made by Egor Khindikaynen aka Ambertape (music). It started as a tool I built for my own music and was later opened up as open source. Most of the code was written with AI assistance, with every design decision, the sound and the workflow guided and shaped by me.

Licensed under AGPL-3.0-only — see LICENSES/ for the terms, and LICENSES/third-party.md for the dependency register.

Nota links JUCE, which is AGPLv3, so the open build is AGPL rather than GPL — see LICENSES/README.md.