Visona
Visona is a beat-synced stereo oscilloscope for music production. It shows your audio as a musical sweep scope locked to MIDI Clock from your DAW, with manual tempo when no clock is present. As a VST3, AU or CLAP plugin it follows the DAW's transport directly.
Download
Pre-built binaries are published on GitHub Releases.
| Platform | Requirement | Package |
|---|
| macOS | Apple Silicon, macOS 14 or later | Visona-macos-arm64.zip — unzip and open Visona.app |
| macOS plugin, Visona | Apple Silicon, macOS 14 or later | Visona-vst3-macos-arm64.zip, Visona-au-macos-arm64.zip or Visona-clap-macos-arm64.zip — see the install folders below (plugin guide) |
| macOS plugin, Visona Sync | Apple Silicon, macOS 14 or later | Visona-sync-vst3-macos-arm64.zip, Visona-sync-au-macos-arm64.zip or Visona-sync-clap-macos-arm64.zip (sidechain sync) |
| Windows plugins | Windows 10 or 11, x64 | Visona-vst3-windows-x64.zip, Visona-clap-windows-x64.zip and the Visona-sync-… zips (install) |
| Linux plugins | x86_64, Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13, Fedora 39 or newer | Visona-vst3-linux-x86_64.tar.gz, Visona-clap-linux-x86_64.tar.gz and the Visona-sync-… tarballs (install) |
| Raspberry Pi | Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit (desktop), ARM64, based on Debian 13 (Trixie) or later | Visona-linux-arm64-pi.tar.gz — see Pi setup and kiosk mode |
From 1.0.0 beta 1 on, the macOS app and plugins are signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so they open without Gatekeeper warnings.
On macOS, copy each plugin bundle into the folder for its format (Windows and Linux: see the plugin guide):
| Format | Bundles | Install folder |
|---|
| VST3 | Visona.vst3, Visona Sync.vst3 | ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/ |
| AU | Visona.component, Visona Sync.component | ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/ |
| CLAP | Visona.clap, Visona Sync.clap | ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/CLAP/ |
Then restart the DAW or rescan its plugins. If a new AU does not show up, refresh macOS's AU cache with killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar and restart the DAW; see the plugin guide.
The plugin (pass-through stereo effect, host transport) ships as VST3, AU and CLAP on macOS, and as VST3 and CLAP on Windows and Linux. Visona Sync, a companion instrument, puts a bar impulse on the plugin's sidechain so Visona can measure how late audio arrives after plugins with latency in Ableton Live, and draw it on the grid. Ableton Live loads the VST3 or AU; for CLAP, use a host such as Reaper or Bitwig Studio. See docs/plugins.md.
What you get
- Sweep scope with bar grid, stacked L/R lanes and a bright write head
- MIDI Clock sync with Start, Stop, Continue and Song Position Pointer
- FREE mode — free-running sweep at a manual BPM when MIDI Clock is absent
- Pause (app) — hold the view and stop the analysis when movement distracts, or to save CPU
- Windows from ¼ bar to 4 bars, horizontal zoom and a measurement ruler
- Waveform modes STD, PRECISE and DJ (frequency colouring in DJ mode)
- Analysis views besides the scope, one at a time, chosen with the view selector (V) or Alt+1 to Alt+4 (not yet in a release):
- Spectrum (FFT) with a fast Peak or RMS curve and a history line, octave smoothing, stereo, Left, Right, Mid and Side analysis and a frequency readout. See spectrum analysis.
- Spectrum (Band) with 31 third-octave bands and peak markers. See band spectrum.
- Stereo with Polar Sample, Polar Level and Lissajous, correlation, energy balance and per-channel signal validity. See stereo analysis.
- Display gain 0–64 dB, with optional auto gain in 3 dB steps (the AUTO button), shared by every view; settings persistence, fullscreen
Works with professional USB audio interfaces. Development and testing use an RME Babyface Pro FS; on Linux and Raspberry Pi the interface must run in USB Class Compliant mode.
Quick start (macOS)
- Download the latest release and open
Visona.app.
- Connect your audio interface and a MIDI clock source (optional).
- In Settings, choose the audio input device and MIDI port.
- Press D to toggle the diagnostics overlay.
- Optionally, route Visona Sync to an input of its own and choose it under Visona Sync in Settings, so Visona measures how late the audio arrives after MIDI Clock. See Visona Sync with the standalone app.
Raspberry Pi appliance
See docs/pi-setup.md, docs/pi-build.md and docs/pi-kiosk.md. For normal use, download the release tarball rather than building on the Pi; it holds the binary and the kiosk scripts.
License
AGPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.
Visona builds on JUCE (AGPL-3.0) and clap-juce-extensions for the CLAP plugins, and contains or builds third-party code under its own licences: KISS FFT (BSD-3-Clause), the LSP correlation and balance meters (LGPL-3.0-or-later) and a polar projection adapted from Signalizer (GPL-3.0-or-later). The tests use Catch2 (BSL-1.0).
Developers
Build and test instructions are in AGENTS.md. Architecture, roadmap and decisions live under docs/, and the technical review describes the condition of the code and a plan for improving it.
Development builds
To test a branch without merging it, or a develop branch you have put together from several, open Actions → Release → Run workflow, choose the branch and tick the artifacts you need. Only the jobs for those artifacts run. The files are published to the Development builds prerelease, named after the artifact, the branch and the commit, and the run's summary links them. A new build of the same artifact from the same branch replaces the earlier one (D-104).
For a faster Pi build, run Actions → Pi quick build → Run workflow instead. It builds only the app, in parallel, with ccache, and skips the tests. It publishes the same Visona-linux-arm64-pi-<branch>-<commit>.tar.gz, so it replaces the branch's Pi build from the Release workflow and installs the same way.
On the Pi, pass the tarball URL from the workflow summary to install-visona.sh (see pi-kiosk.md):
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stephanterning/visona/main/scripts/pi/install-visona.sh | bash -s -- \
'https://github.com/stephanterning/visona/releases/download/dev-builds/Visona-linux-arm64-pi-develop-abc1234.tar.gz'
