ArtCraft released SoundCraft, an open-source Pro Tools alternative in Rust

A free digital audio workstation that keeps the Edit and Mix windows audio engineers already know, bounces to WAV with LUFS reporting, and lets a coding agent run the same commands an engineer types is now the alternative that studios on an Avid Pro Tools subscription did not have last month. SoundCraft, the eighth app from the ArtCraft open-source team, is a Rust audio workstation that the project pitches as a clean-room reimplementation of Avid Pro Tools. The GitHub repository was created on 7 October 2026 and had 3,202 stars by 18 October.

SoundCraft runs natively on macOS as a universal binary, on Windows (x64, x86 and Arm), Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm, Flatpak), FreeBSD and a RISC-V tarball, and in the browser through WebAssembly from the same codebase. The source is on GitHub under MIT or Apache-2.0 at the user's option, and the ArtCraft organisation has 55,545 followers and 66 public repositories dating from January 2021. The project marks itself as pre-alpha.

The Pro Tools workflow, kept window by window

The README says the Edit window arranges and edits clips with Shuffle, Slip, Spot and Grid modes and the Smart, Selector, Grabber, Trim, Pencil, Zoom and Scrubber tools, and the Mix window handles ten inserts and ten sends per track, busses, aux inputs, master faders, VCA masters, routing folders and the solo modes. Automation runs for volume, pan, mute, sends and every plugin parameter, written live in Write, Touch and Latch passes. The project ships original CLAP plugins including a seven-band EQ, compressor and limiter, expander, gate, de-esser, maximizer, channel strip, room and plate reverbs, mod delay, chorus, flanger, phaser, saturator, pitch and time shift, a subtractive synth, a drum synth and a sampler, and loads third-party CLAP, VST3 and Audio Units with their own editors.

What the project says about coverage

The README states the pre-alpha covers 94 percent of the incumbent's menu items by presence and 70 percent by feature depth, and estimates the tool is 40 percent of the way to replacing Pro Tools for real work. Record, edit, mix and bounce run end to end, and bouncing to WAV, AIFF or FLAC at 16, 24 or 32-bit float reports peak, true peak and integrated loudness in LUFS. Still missing before alpha, the project lists: choosing an audio interface and buffer size, recording MIDI from a controller, and AAF or OMF session interchange with other DAWs. Translations are also missing. Treat the coverage numbers as the project's own.

The MCP server and the command line

Every menu item, tool and prompt in SoundCraft is also a command with an id and JSON parameters, reachable from the keyboard, a soundcraft-cli shell tool, a JSON control channel and an MCP server. A single CLI call can load the demo session, turn the kick down by six decibels, insert an EQ on the bass track and bounce the result to a WAV file. The session.audio_health command returns a JSON report on loaded audio availability, sample-rate mismatches and clip source bounds, which an agent can parse. A studio that pays an Avid seat per engineer to re-render stems, batch-bounce alternate masters or check loudness compliance on a sheet of mixes can call SoundCraft from a script to do those routine jobs today. A tracking session that depends on a specific hardware interface, Pro Tools MIDI recording, or AAF handoff to another studio has to wait for the alpha milestone the project lists.

Source

storytold/soundcraft on GitHub.