soundcraft
An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Avid Pro Tools in pure Rust
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
SoundCraft is a clean-room rebuild of Avid Pro Tools in Rust: the Edit and Mix windows, edit modes, playlists, automation, a MIDI piano roll, and its own EQ, compressor, reverbs and synths. It's free under MIT or Apache-2.0, with builds for macOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and the browser.
Install a release and open the demo song. Your CLAP, VST3 and Audio Units plugins load, but not AAX, Pro Tools' own format, and the maintainers call AAX likely never. On macOS, the signed builds currently refuse third-party VST3 (an open issue). An MCP server lets Claude run a mix and bounce it headless.
There's no paid tier. Solo: free, fine for cutting a podcast or sketching a song. Small studios and post houses: stay on Pro Tools, or try Ardour, the mature open source DAW. Larger facilities: not close.
The catch: its own roadmap calls it pre-alpha, about 40% of the way to real work, and it went public a week ago, built at speed by AI coding agents. You can't record MIDI from a keyboard yet, and there's no AAF, OMF or .ptx, so a session someone sends you won't open. Five platforms build; only macOS has been exercised.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: Everything. Dual-licensed MIT OR Apache-2.0 with no paid tier. Signed installers for macOS (universal), Windows (x64, x86, Arm), Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm, Flatpak), FreeBSD, plus a WebAssembly build that runs in the browser. Built-in plugins (EQ, dynamics, reverbs, delay, modulation, synths, sampler) are included.
Self-hosted: It's a desktop app, nothing to host. Building from source needs Rust 1.95 or later for the desktop and web UI, and the ALSA headers on Linux. ASIO on Windows is behind an opt-in asio build feature.
Paid: No paid tier. The real comparison is Pro Tools' subscription; SoundCraft can't open Pro Tools sessions or run AAX plugins, so switching means re-buying or finding VST3/AU/CLAP versions of your plugins and rebuilding sessions by hand.
Free with no paid tier. The cost of switching from Pro Tools is your AAX plugins and every existing session, neither of which carries over.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; good for podcasts, demos and learning the Pro Tools workflow without a subscription
- Small team
- free to evaluate, but no MIDI controller recording and no session interchange yet; keep Pro Tools or use Ardour
- Medium team
- not yet; no AAF/OMF and no AAX means no collaboration with other studios
- Large team
- not yet; no control surfaces, sync or Avid hardware support
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License: MIT OR Apache-2.0
Use freely under either license; the Apache side adds a patent grant. ArtCraft logos must be removed from modified builds.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
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