Analog feel. Digital precision.
zxc.studio is a free DAW for creators.
Made by your friends from RevolutionsRecords.com
Free. Tested on hardware.
Linux, macOS and WindowsThe grid
Off when the application opens. One key turns it on, mid-take if you like.
Led Zeppelin didn’t record to a click. Billie Eilish does.
Great craft comes in many forms. You choose.
Some days you want to play free and let the take breathe. Other days you want every note locked to a grid. We couldn’t find a simple DAW that did both well, so we built one.
The grid is off when it opens. Press g to bring it in, even mid-take.
Turn the tape over
One key. The whole session plays backwards — and you can record against it.
Reversed audio built half the records you love. It was never an effect.
Every DAW will reverse a clip for you. That is a render: you pick a region, you wait, and you get a new file that plays backwards. What the studios that made those records actually did was turn the tape over and play — and then play along with it.
Press f and the whole session flips over, like a tape. Totally different experience.
Then arm a track and record against it. Flip it back and your new take sits right where you played it — reversed, the way the old records did it.
Punch in and out
A punch replaces only what sits between the two markers.
Two clicks set the in and out points. Recording runs from before the in point so you arrive already playing, and stops after the out point so you can follow through — but only what falls between the markers is replaced.
Nothing about that is destructive, because nothing in this program is. Trim, cut, move and punch are all windows onto a file that is never rewritten, and no edit ever unlinks a WAV. The audio you recorded is still on disk after you delete the track it was on.
Snap that follows the performance
With the grid off, edits snap to note starts found in the waveform — not to a tempo.
Snapping usually means surrendering to a tempo. Here it does not. With the grid off, an edit boundary goes to the nearest note start found in the waveform itself, within 250 milliseconds — and if there is no note nearby, it stays exactly where you put it rather than inventing a position.
Turn the grid on and the same gesture snaps to beats instead. You pick which one the music is organised by.
Your plugins, your keyboard
VST3 effects and instruments on any track, played from whatever MIDI keyboard you have.
Use the plugins you already own. VST3 effects stack on a track in the order you put them, instruments go at the head of one, and any MIDI keyboard you plug in can play them — a controller you have had for years, or the one you borrowed this afternoon. Press b on a track to see what is on it, and open a plugin’s own window when you want it, or the application’s controls for it when you would rather stay on the keyboard.
Your chain, its settings and the instrument you chose are saved with the session and come back when it opens. What you hear while you play is what the mixdown renders, because there is one audio path through this program rather than a playback one and an export one that can quietly disagree.
Stack sounds as you play
Load your VST3 synths, arm as many as you like, and one keyboard plays all of them at once.
Press one key. Three instruments answer.
Sounds nobody has made yet, because nobody has stacked these three.
Drop a synth on a track and it plays. Drop another on the next one, arm them both, and now a single key is two instruments moving together — a pad with a bell on top of it, a Rhodes with a sub underneath that you feel more than hear. Arm a third and the chord you were noodling turns into something nobody has a name for.
Big sounds have always been stacks. The difference is that you are hearing this one while you write it, with both hands on one keyboard, instead of building it a pass at a time and hoping the parts sit together at the end. Play to the whole sound, and the whole sound plays back.
Detune one. Drop another an octave. Mute the lead you thought was the point and keep the thing underneath it that you did not plan. Keep going and you find sounds you did not know existed — and the best of them are never the ones you set out to make.
Finish it and send it
Three formats out of one mixdown, with the titles and credits written in.
ctrl e renders the session to a stereo mixdown. It opens no audio device, so it works with nothing plugged in, and it tells you how much faster than realtime it ran.
Ask for more than one format and you still get one render. The mix is summed once and fanned out to every encoder, so the MP3 is not a transcode of the WAV and cannot quietly disagree with it.
- WAV 24-bit .wav
- lossless, largest, opens anywhere
- FLAC .flac
- lossless, about half the size
- MP3 320 .mp3
- lossy, smallest, plays anywhere
Title, artist and album go into whichever formats are written, and the title defaults to the session’s own name. A field you leave blank writes no tag at all rather than an empty one.
The mixdown honours the tape flip, because a mixdown is playback with nothing pacing it. A render that ignored the flip would be a second way of summing the same session, which is the one thing worth never having.
Linux, not as a port
Native PipeWire and JACK clients, written against each API rather than through a layer.
A native PipeWire filter node and a native JACK client, written against each API rather than through a compatibility layer. No wine, no bridge, no “Linux build” that is really a port of a Windows one. Raw ALSA was measured during the latency work and rejected as a launch backend — highest latency, and it broke up at a 64-frame buffer — so ALSA devices are reached through PipeWire instead.
macOS runs the same engine through CoreAudio, including pairing an input-only and an output-only device into a private aggregate, so a Mac with nothing plugged into it still records.
A session is a plain directory: one session.json and a folder of 32-bit float WAVs, with relative paths throughout. You can move it, copy it to another machine, or commit it to git, and it still opens.
Driven from the keys
Every action reachable without a pointer — which began as a way to test the program, and turned into an accessibility win.
Transport
- space
- Play, and stop what is rolling
- r
- Record every armed track from the playhead
- home
- Back to the start of the session
- f
- Turn the tape over, so the session plays backwards
Tracks and takes
- ↑↓
- Select a track
- return
- Select the take under the playhead
- ctrla
- Select every take on the selected track
- esc
- Let go of the selection
- i
- Choose which input feeds the armed track — a channel, or a keyboard
- b
- Show the selected track's instrument and effects
Editing
- v
- The select tool
- p
- The punch tool — click a track twice to set the region
- c
- The cut tool — a click splits, a drag cuts the span
- s
- Snap to the nearest beat, or note start with the grid off
- o
- Drop a punch in point, then an out point
- x
- Mark a cut boundary; press it again to cut between the two
- []
- Trim the selected take's start or end to the playhead
- ←→
- Move the selection along the timeline
- del
- Remove what is selected — the takes, or the track when nothing is held
- shiftdel
- Clear the selected track's recording and keep the track
- ctrlz
- Take back the last edit
Tempo and metronome
- g
- Show the tempo grid, and hide it again — off by default
- k
- The metronome, which sounds only while the grid is on
- t
- Tap the pulse to set the tempo — clicking the tempo field does the same
Session
- ctrls
- Save the session
- ctrlo
- Open another session
- ctrle
- Export a mixdown
- ctrl,
- Audio setup — device, rate, buffer and latency
- m
- Measure the round trip over a loopback
- F1
- The whole list, inside the application
- ctrlq
- Leave — unsaved work is asked about first
In a panel
- esc
- Leave the panel, changing nothing
- return
- The primary button — Apply, Export, Done
- ↑↓
- Walk a list of choices — inputs, formats
- space
- Switch the highlighted choice on or off
- e
- Open the highlighted plugin's controls, and close them again
- tab
- Walk the panel's own fields, and shift+tab back
On a Mac, read ctrl as ⌘ — the application spells each binding the way the platform does. The list above is transcribed from the one the program reads its own keys from, which is also the one F1 draws: a shortcut cannot exist without appearing in Help, and Help cannot claim one that does not work.
What it doesn’t do
Some of this is a decision and the rest is a gap. The difference is the point.
On purpose
No grid unless you ask
The lanes have no vertical lines at all until you turn the grid on — second markers that look like a grid are still a grid. The metronome and the tempo field appear with it and leave with it.
No software input monitoring
Your interface already does direct monitoring in hardware, with none of the latency a software path adds. An instrument you play from a keyboard is the exception, because there is no hardware path for one — you hear it through the program, armed or rolling.
No piano roll, and nothing stores a note
A synth is recorded the way a microphone is: as audio, on its own track, as you played it. There is nothing to quantise afterwards because there is nothing programmed to quantise — and what lands on disk is the sound, not a set of instructions for making it again.
Nothing is ever written over
Trim, cut, move, punch and the tape flip are all views onto a file that is never rewritten. Nothing in the program unlinks a WAV — the audio is still on disk after you delete the track it was on.
Not yet
No Windows build yet
The WASAPI backend is being written. Until it lands a Windows build would open and not hear your interface, which is worse than not offering one.
No automation
A plugin's controls stay where you leave them. Nothing records a knob move or plays one back, so a part that has to change has to be played that way — which, for what it is worth, is also how the records this program is for were made.
VST3 only
No AU, no CLAP, no LV2. One format hosted properly is worth more than four hosted thinly, and effects and instruments both come in this one.
Nothing goes back out to MIDI
Your keyboard plays the instruments inside the session; the application sends nothing to the room. A hardware synth is still welcome — it comes in the way everything else does, through its outputs.
One level of undo, and no redo
Ctrl+Z takes back the last edit — any edit, including a trim, a cut, a punch and a take that just landed. Pressing it again does nothing, because there is one level and taking it is what spends it.
No stem export
The mixdown is stereo. Your takes are already standard 32-bit float WAVs in a plain folder, so a per-track file is a copy away, but the application will not write you a set.
Made by Revolutions Records
A record label that got tired of waiting for the right tool and wrote one.
An independent label, making tools instead of asking for them.
A label, not a software company
Revolutions Records is an independent label. This recorder exists because the people running it needed one, and the shortest route to a tool that respects a session was to write it.
The tools decide what gets made
Every piece of recording software teaches a way of working, usually by making one way easy and the rest a fight. A grid on by default is not a neutral default — it is an opinion about what music is. We would rather hand you fewer opinions.
More art, from more people
The thing standing between an idea and a recording is almost never talent. It is setup, licences, and an hour of configuration before the first take. zxc.studio is free, and it opens ready to record, because that hour is where ideas die.
Get it
Free, and the same engine wherever you work — your Linux box, your MacBook, and Windows next. Take your pick.
Linux
x86_64 · PipeWire + JACK
Tested on hardwareA real native build, not a port. PipeWire or JACK, your distro, your interface — this is where it was written and it is where it runs best.
libpipewire-0.3 and libjack — pipewire-jack is what most distributions ship.
Get it at releasemacOS
Apple silicon · CoreAudio
BetaNative on Apple silicon, straight onto CoreAudio. Open the lid, plug in, record — the window is still getting its hours in, so it goes out as a beta.
macOS 12 or later. CoreAudio directly — nothing to install underneath it.
Get it at releaseWindows
x86_64 · WASAPI
In progressNext on the bench. The engine is done and the Windows audio layer is being written — we'll tell you the day it can hear your interface.
Tell me when it lands
Free when it lands
One email, when there is something to download.
zxc.studio is a free DAW for creators. We’re also working on making it open source — sign up for our newsletter to get an occasional update from us.