Show HN: Audionaut – an open-source cross-platform multitrack audio editor
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A free, open-source multitrack audio editor that AI agents can drive over MCP.
audionaut.app · Features · Discussions · Sponsor
Audionaut is a free, open-source desktop application for effortless audio editing and recording. Whether you’re working on music, podcasts, or multitrack recordings, it gives you precise cutting, per-track playlists, flexible multi-channel support, and clean exports — without the weight and complexity of a full DAW. Audionaut is written in modern C++ on the JUCE framework and runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Audionaut speaks MCP, so Claude and other agents can edit your sessions. With the app and Node.js 18+ installed:
Keep the project open in Audionaut and each edit arrives as one undo step. On macOS, keep projects in your Music folder. Claude Desktop setup and details: manual, chapter 11.
Make sure to clone with submodules:
The analysis features (BIC segmentation, onset detection, beat tracking) link against a static build of the Essentia submodule. Build it once after checking out the submodules:
The script builds Essentia’s 3rd-party dependencies statically (slow, skipped on re-runs; force with FORCE_3RDPARTY=1), then configures and builds Essentia itself with its waf build system into Submodules/essentia/build. It patches Essentia’s Linux-oriented 3rd-party build scripts in the working tree as needed for macOS/Apple Silicon, so the essentia submodule will show as dirty afterwards — don’t commit those changes.
Building Essentia is optional: without it, ESSENTIA_ENABLED auto-detects off and the app and tests compile with the analysis features disabled.
Stem separation runs demucs.cpp, a C++ port of Meta’s Demucs, compiled straight from the Submodules/demucs.cpp submodule — no separate build step. It needs the submodule’s vendored Eigen (Submodules/demucs.cpp/vendor/eigen, a nested submodule that —recursive fetches); the CMake build detects it and sets AUDIONAUT_ENABLE_DEMUCS accordingly. The model weights are not in the repository: the app downloads them on first use into its Models folder, or point the CLI at a copy with —model.
Xcode — open the Xcode project located here:
Visual Studio 2026 — open the Visual Studio solution located here:
Linux Makefile — install dependencies:
See the Catch2 tests README.
audionaut-cli gives scripts, CI and AI agents headless access to .audium projects — no GUI, no audio device. It builds alongside the tests:
Every command takes —json to emit exactly one machine-readable result envelope on stdout ({“ok”: true, “result”: …} or {“ok”: false, “error”: …}) with all logging on stderr, plus —quiet. Exit codes: 0 success, 1 operation failed, 2 usage error, 3 feature unavailable in this build (e.g. analyze without Essentia). Option values may be given as —opt value or —opt=value.
A typical agent flow: create → import → analyze → auto-edit/assemble → export, checking ok in each —json envelope. Projects written by the CLI open in the GUI app and vice versa.
End-user documentation lives in the User Manual.
CLI invocations report anonymous usage statistics under the same strictly opt-in consent as the app (one cli_command event: verb and exit code) — nothing is sent unless consent was granted in the app’s settings. Set AUDIONAUT_DISABLE_ANALYTICS=1 to switch the CLI’s reporting off regardless (CI environments, scripts).
The main Audionaut app also accepts the same verbs (Projucer-style): run the app binary with a verb and it executes headlessly and quits with the command’s exit code, even while a GUI instance is open — a file argument or no arguments launches the GUI as usual.
Note: the macOS app is sandboxed, so its in-app CLI can only reach entitlement-covered locations such as ~/Music; the standalone audionaut-cli build has no such restriction. On Windows, the app is a GUI program — the shell prompt returns immediately and output interleaves with it; prefer audionaut-cli for scripting there.
Audionaut is dual-licensed under GPL3 (or later) and a commercial license — see LICENSE.md for details.
Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for how to get started and the required Contributor License Agreement (CLA.md).
If Audionaut is useful to you, consider sponsoring its development — sponsorship directly funds development time and keeps the project sustainable.
Audionaut professional audio editing and audio recording