ItsAlphaNeon / Lemon-Studio

A free and open-source digital audio workstation, written in Rust. 
 Overview ·
 Capabilities ·
 Getting started ·
 Architecture ·
 Roadmap ·
 Contributing ·
 Community ·
 License 
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## Overview
Lemon Studio is a pattern-based music production environment: build patterns in a step sequencer and
piano roll, arrange them on a playlist, and mix them through a routable mixer. It is written from the
ground up in Rust, with a sample-accurate audio engine, a fast CPU-rendered interface and hosting for
CLAP, VST3 and VST2 plugins.
Lemon Studio runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, and every change is built and tested on all three. macOS is supported
at the same level as Linux; the few differences are listed in the macOS notes.
A central goal is **interoperability**: Lemon Studio opens and saves FL Studio projects (`.flp`). The
project reader is built to round-trip: anything in a file that Lemon Studio does not understand yet is
kept and written back unchanged, so a project survives being opened and saved. This support is still
young, so read the warning below before trying it on real work.
> [!WARNING]
> **Lemon Studio is pre-alpha software.** It is under active development and is not yet a usable DAW:
> expect missing features, rough edges and breaking changes.
>
> - **Greyed-out controls are not implemented yet.** Many menus and buttons are already laid out but do
> nothing so far; they are drawn dim and say "not available yet".
> - **No prebuilt binaries** will be published until Lemon Studio reaches a usable state. Until then it
> can only be built from source.
> - **Only projects saved by FL Studio 24.2 or later open for now** (25 and 26 included). Older projects
> are refused with a dialog that explains how to re-save them; support for them is on the roadmap.
> - **Project-file support is at a very early stage.** Do not overwrite your original `.flp` projects
> with files saved by Lemon Studio until this support is declared stable. Work on copies and keep backups.
## Capabilities
Where Lemon Studio stands against what a complete DAW offers:
| Area | Status | Notes |
|---|:---:|---|
| Step sequencing and patterns | ✅ | Channel rack with steps, mini piano rolls, swing and per-channel loops |
| Piano roll | ✅ | Full tool set, velocity and event lanes, quantize, chop, strum, arpeggiate and more |
| Song arrangement | ✅ | Playlist with pattern, audio and automation clips, clip groups, markers and several arrangements |
| Mixing and routing | ✅ | Mixer tracks, sends, effect slots and meters; no sidechain inputs yet |
| Plugin hosting | ✅ | CLAP, VST3 and VST2 instruments and effects with their editors; on Windows a crashing plugin is stopped instead of closing Lemon Studio; no 32-bit plugins |
| Plugin management | ✅ | Plugin manager with your own search folders, a crash-safe background scan, favourites and hidden plugins |
| Time-stretching | ✅ | All twelve stretch methods for samples and audio clips, played by one open-source stretcher |
| Playback engin