Meadowlark, a DAW written in Rust

100%. I want something that combines the multitrack timeline of ACID with the MIDI, control, and audio routing of a virtual modular synth or console.jp (sadly not updated since 2008). I would work for a significant pay cut on such a project if someone's hiring.

But also a tangent: anyone developing node-based software please give me schematic-style straight lines and angles to route connections! Noodles that look like real cables definitely take the skeuomorphism to 11, and plain straight lines without routing are really easy to implement, but they're both very impractical for more than just a few connections. I'll open source my old startup's Qt implementation of a node canvas if it helps.

* edit - To make it clear, neither I or anyone on my team made this post in HN *

First off, it's always great to see the growing interest in this project! I know it's very ambitious, but it will never happen if someone doesn't try, right?

Second, yes the design doc is just for the MVP product, not a fully-featured DAW. When I mentioned fully-featured, I meant it in regard to the end goal of my vision, so people would get a better idea on what the project is heading for and why I made some of the design decisions. I thought there wouldn't be any confusion on that, but apparently I was wrong.

Third, my plan in regard to time signature is to abstract away all the logic into the `https://github.com/RustyDAW/rusty-daw-timeline` repo. It's sole purpose it to be a black-box that takes a function of musical time (f64 of beats) and returns sample time (represented as i64), and vice versa. This will allow us to add time signature changes as well as automation of tempo changes in the future. I figured 4/4 time was good enough for a proof-of-concept MVP. Apparently there is a lot of demand for other time signatures, so I could add it higher in the priority list either after MVP or in the MVP if we have the time.

Fourth, my decision of Rust was mostly decided because of the great Rust community. I've found many friends on the Rust Audio Discord server, and I would never have started this project without them. Plus I also believe that the better memory safety and modularity of Rust will make it much easier to maintain a larger project with less time spent debugging and fixing crashes.

Fifth, it's a dream of mine have a whole FLOSS ecosystem of creative apps that any artist around the world can use without restriction. Apps like Blender, Gimp, Krita, Inkscape, etc. However, I personally find the current state of FLOSS DAWs to be lacking, especially when it comes to MIDI editing, automation, and sound design. Ardour is okay, but only if you don't mess with MIDI. Nothing I've seen yet comes close to the usability of commercial DAWs, and I wish to change that. (With maybe the exception of ZRythm, but it is just too unstable to use imo, and it's also not truly FLOSS as it requires a paid license to download the binaries, (same for Ardour on non-Linux systems)).

Finally, not much development has been done on the GUI side yet since I'm still waiting on the GUI library to stabilize and add the features I need. Hopefully I can have more to actually show fairly soon!

Yes, a scripting API is planned. The GUI is being designed from the ground-up to where every action will go through an event system, so script will be able to do pretty much anything the GUI can do.

A lot of the backend components will also be separated into a separate repo under the RustyDAW project, allowing someone else to create their own DAW with their own GUI if they wish.

"- How flexible the UI is going to be? Multi-monitor setups of different configurations are very frequent in studios, free docks and/or floating windows are very important."

We're not too sure on this one yet, it mostly depends on how many features the GUI library we are using will get. We hope to have a GUI that is as flexible as possible.

"- I see you mention sidechain routing, but it's unclear what are the plans on multichannel audio and, more importantly, the routing possibilities. I'd love to see some kind of node editor for this where you can visualize and manage complex routing schemes for your projects just dragging nodes and noodles."

We are currently working on a complex audio graph in the https://github.com/RustyDAW/rusty-daw-audio-graph repo. This will hopefully allow us to support any kind of complex audio graph structure.

So far this audio graph only supports mono and stereo audio, but we can easily add more ports for multichannel audio in the future.

Beyond MVP we will likely add either a Live/Bitwig style horizontal rack, or a FL Studio Patcher style plugin for advance routing. It's still being decided on which one we will go with.

* edit - fix typo