WAVE is a desktop music production program (a DAW) for Windows and Linux. It is free, the
source is open, and it is made for one job: making a beat and recording
a vocal over it, the way you would in FL Studio.
Note from developer (This part is not AI SLOP)
- 2010: I downloaded FL Studio for the first time and started making music.
- 2015: I started music school: cello, guitar and piano (graduated in 2019).
- 2016–2022: I sold beats to underground rappers in Poland (pop, true school, trap, love songs).
- Along the way I tried almost every genre (EDM, lo-fi, classical, my own pop songs), often with real instruments in my beats. I also run a YouTube channel and master the voice for it myself.
- 2022: I joined Nokia, where I work on noise cancellation for telecom radios. That is a lot of DSP math, so I understand how sound works under the hood.
WAVE started as a fun experiment. I wanted a modern DAW where every instrument and effect
feels like part of the same application: they share the same controls and visualizations, a
new feature reaches the whole app at once, and you don't juggle a dozen different interfaces.
Yes, it is vibe-coded with Claude Fable, but I know what the code is doing.
There are already excellent open-source DAWs, and I'm not trying to replace them. I just
wanted a different workflow, and ended up using WAVE more than FL Studio itself.
Why WAVE
If you know FL Studio, you already know WAVE. Patterns on a free playlist, a Channel Rack
with a step sequencer, a piano roll per channel. The gestures are the same too: right-click
deletes, middle-button drag pans, Ctrl+Q quantizes, Alt+wheel changes velocity. A beat plays
on the first press of Space.
Recording and vocals are not an edition. Loop recording with takes and comping, measured
latency compensation, a note-level pitch editor, live pitch correction, Tune to Reference
(pull a take onto a guide vocal), a vocal rider and a one-click vocal chain. All of it is in
the one free build.
Every effect draws what it does to your audio. The picture above the knobs comes from the
signal passing through, so you see the gain reduction or the added harmonics instead of
guessing. These were recorded in the app while a beat plays (drums, an 808, the piano and a
pluck, written through the wave command):
All 14 plugin windows are on the website.
An AI agent can work in the project you have open. WAVE installs a wave command that
talks to the running app. The agent reads the song as JSON, writes notes and sets knobs on
your screen, then bounces offline and reads back peak, level and clipping, because it cannot
hear. Every command is one step in your undo history, so Ctrl+Z removes whatever you do not
like. This trap beat was made that way.
wave context --pretty # tracks, inserts, patterns, channels
wave pattern --id 2 --ch hat --steps "x.x. x.x. x.x5 x.x9"
wave add-fx --insert 6 --type reverb --preset 3
wave render --out check.wav --to 16 # offline bounce + level statistics
The engine is written for the audio thread first. The callback never allocates, locks or
touches a file (the benchmark counts allocations on the audio thread: zero). Moving a knob never rebuilds the graph.
Sixteen synth voices with two oscillators and seven-voice unison each, every effect on, take
about 17 % of one core at 48 kHz with 64-sample blocks, and the oscillators stay more than
60 dB above their aliasing up to C7 (measurements). How it is put together: docs/architecture.md.
What is in the box
| |
|---|
| Arranging | Pattern, audio and automation clips on free lanes; slice, fade, reverse, normalise; stretch audio clips by dragging their edges (Shift+M), keeping pitch or resampled; automation curves edited on the clip |
| Writing | Step sequencer with swing and velocity, piano roll, computer keyboard or MIDI keyboard as the instrument |
| Instruments | Two-oscillator wavetable synth (unison, mod matrix, 46 presets); WAVE Keys, a sampled concert grand; a sampler with a built-in drum and tonal library plus downloadable CC0 kits |
| Mixing | 24-band dynamic EQ, compressor, FET compressor, saturator, delay, reverb, limiter, de-esser, denoiser; presets on every effect |
| Recording | Takes and comping, latency compensation, live monitoring |
| Vocals | Pitch editor, live correction, Tune to Reference, vocal rider, vocal chain |
| Plugins and audio | VST3 effects after a crash-proof scan (their own windows on Windows, WAVE's parameter list on Linux); WASAPI and ASIO on Windows, ALSA and JACK, including PipeWire's JACK, on Linux |
| Export | Offline bounce of the song or a loop to 32-bit float WAV or MP3 |
| Language | English and Polish |
WAVE and FL Studio, honestly
WAVE borrows FL Studio's way of working, so that is the fair comparison. FL Studio has more
than twenty-five years behind it and wins on breadth.
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