Chaotic Daw: Clever New Open Source Daw

Hey guys, I’m part of a small team of peeps that are working on the newly open-sourced DAW Chaotic, and I thought I’d let you Renoisers know in case you’re interested in helping out.

Chaotic DAW website
the GitHub

It’s a pretty rad program that has a lot of promise.

Interesting. Any info how much they will charge for license?

(That means free. ^_^ )

Download page was talking about license keys and demo version with restrictions. I was thinking a nigga might need a license in order to release commercially available music produced with Chaotic (like some free software does), or is that only for the beta phase?

I like the approach it’s taking on DAWs but the GUI is an eyesore. I’ll pick this up again further in development.

If you can compile it.
I don’t think they release the binaries for free.

The licenses section of the website is from when it was commercial. Denis has removed licensing entirely.

Actually, it’s not currently ready for open-source development, besides source code is available. To be an interesting open-source project, it lacks at least two essential parts:

  1. Good user manual, so any potential user or dev can quickly acquaint themselves with the app and start to test it and work with it;
  2. Good source code documentation and optimization.

After these two parts are ready, it will be officially a new open-source project.

And of course, the GUI is very weak currently, I know that. This was an unsuccessful attempt to make it extremely dark and minimalistic to avoid the “interface suppressing the user” effect, don’t know how to call it better, when user becomes lost and afraid of large number of various interface details and controls. I consider interface also as major issue to be solved.

Thanks

Cool project. :)

As someone who hopes to someday have free time for audio plugin development, I’m a bit curious about the “rosic” DSP library as I found little to no information about it. What I did find is this post at kvraudio which led me to rs-met.com. There I found some good articles about signal processing, but no sign of any library. Where does it come from, and what license restrictions come with it?

It looks like a good reference for many effects, but I’m not sure if I can actually use it.

Cheers.

Robin, the author of ROSIC, assured me that I can apply the same license restrictions for the library he provided, as for the rest of Chaotic source. But I haven’t decided yet which open-source license to use for Chaotic, will see that. Any suggestions from anybody?

I like the GUI :) Maybe I try it once my current “project” is done.

Oh my, what a nice guy. :)

I don’t know if this is helpful, but this is my general view of open source licenses.

You have basically two choices; “freedom for the code” vs “freedom for developers”.

The first choice is the most complicated one in my opinion, and that’s the GNU General Public License. It’s less permissive than other open source licenses, but forces the code to stay open. The GPL is often called a “viral license”, which means that anyone that want to use your code, has to convert their code to use the GPL as well. This is not always a realistic option, and makes it unusable for developers that work on projects with other license restrictions.

For open source applications this might be a good choice, but for libraries this is just plain annoying (see libreadline for an example). The Lesser GPL license exists as an alternative for libraries, and it is a bit more permissive; but it requires the library to be dynamically linked with your application (i.e. you’re not allowed statically link it :().

And then there’s licenses that enforces “freedom for developers”, and there’s a bunch to choose from. I personally like the Zlib License, similar licenses are the MIT License or the 2-clause BSD License. The best thing about these is that you don’t have to be a lawyer to understand them. They are short and to the point; no fuzz.

(sidenote: I use the zlib license for my projects because it’s short and understandable. I also want my work to be available to as many as possible (even if it’s not much). Unfortunately for me, it also means using GPL-code is a big no-no. And I can’t really use LGPL either, as I like to have the option of distributing my projects as single self-contained binaries.)

Anyway, here’s a complete list of licenses to choose from. In the end, it depends on how you want your code to be used.

Changing subject now;

I like the minimalistic GUI style. Perhaps it can be improved like you say (I’m no UI-guy), but I really like what you’re going for. Good luck with the project, it looks very promising. :)

OK, it seems that “freedom for developers” is the most obvious choice for Chaotic. I don’t see why it should go with GPL or LGPL. Probably I’ll compose something based on ZLib license and other similar, when I have time.

Regarding the GUI, I’m also thinking about some kind of GUI/skin editor, to allow others propose their own view of appearance, and also, to easily add their own graphics in the project, together with adding their own types of instruments/effects/patterns.