savannah-i-g/nanotracker

NanoTracker is a desktop application for making music using a tracker style interface, where sounds and patterns are arranged in a grid rather than a traditional timeline. It started life as a web application, and this repository is a rewrite of it as a native desktop program, which the author says is now the project's main home going forward, with the original web version kept only as a reference for how things were meant to behave. The program combines a classic pattern editor for sequencing notes with a more modern piano roll view, and includes a patchable workspace where you connect different pieces, such as audio, control signals, gates, and MIDI, together with virtual cables, similar to a modular synthesizer. It can load and run sound-generating plugins in three different formats, including its own custom format plus two widely used industry standards, and on Linux it can optionally run risky plugins in a separate process so that a crash does not take down the whole program. It also supports hardware MIDI keyboards and controllers with tightly timed clock syncing, has a built in sampler with slice editing, and can export finished tracks as WAV, OGG, or MP3 files, including individual instrument stems and loudness normalized masters. It can also import songs from several older tracker file formats. The project is built in C++ and uses OpenAL Soft for audio, OpenGL and Dear ImGui for its interface, and is tested with a dedicated test suite that checks its audio engine, file format handling, and plugin hosting. Ready to use builds are available for Linux, with a beta build for Windows that the author is still gathering feedback on from real hardware. Building it from source requires CMake, a C++20 compiler, and Python with a templating library, and the project documents its own project file format and dependency licenses in detail. The code is released under the GPLv3 license, with a specific exception that keeps the plugin format headers permissively licensed so plugin authors are not bound by the main license's copyleft terms.