Omni is a professional Digital Audio Workstation written entirely in Rust — combining a lock-free, real-time audio engine with a GPU-accelerated interface (egui/eframe). Designed for producers who demand both reliability and performance, Omni delivers a complete music production environment on Linux and Windows.

Audio Engine
Omni's engine is built for zero-compromise real-time performance. The processing pipeline runs with SCHED_FIFO priority, memory-locked pages, FTZ/DAZ denormal protection, and a SIMD-optimized (f32x4) mixing bus. Plugin Delay Compensation (PDC) is automatic and DAG-aware. The engine never allocates on the audio thread.

Session View — Step Sequencer + Piano Roll + Euclidean Sequencer
The Session View offers a clip-launching workflow similar to modern loop-based DAWs. Each clip contains a 32-step pattern sequencer with dedicated lanes for pitch, velocity, gate length, probability, and performance modifiers. The full-featured Piano Roll editor includes scale-aware fold modes, velocity-to-brightness note coloring, snap grid quantization, marquee selection, copy/paste/duplicate, transpose, legato tools, and real-time note audition.

Arrangement View
A timeline-based arrangement editor with waveform display, clip split/resize/fade, drag-and-drop across tracks, loop regions, markers, and per-parameter automation lanes. Seamless crossfade switching between Session Arrangement modes.

Mixer
Per-track volume, pan, and trim controls with mute/solo/record arm. Send/return routing with pre- and post-fader sends. Master bus with dedicated FX chain. Real-time peak metering on every channel.

10 Built-in Professional Effects
Parametric EQ (3-band biquad) · Compressor (soft knee, auto-makeup, parallel mix, sidechain) · Stereo Delay (tempo-sync, ping-pong, LP feedback) · State Variable Filter (LP/HP/BP/Notch, zero-delay feedback) · Algorithmic Reverb (FDN architecture) · Chorus · Phaser · Saturator/Overdrive · Brickwall Limiter · Insert Chain.

Plugin Hosting
CLAP and VST3 plugins are hosted in isolated child processes via shared memory IPC for crash safety. Full parameter automation, state save/restore, and X11 editor window support are included.

Sampler Engine
Multi-format audio loading (WAV, MP3, FLAC, OGG via Symphonia), automatic high-quality resampling (Rubato, SincFixedIn, BlackmanHarris2), slice detection, MIDI-mapped triggering, and velocity layers.

Tech Stack: Rust 2021/2024 · egui 0.33 · cpal · wide (SIMD) · petgraph + rayon · clap-sys · serde_json.

Omni is currently in early Alpha. It is actively developed and not yet recommended for production use. Feedback and bug reports are warmly welcome.

Free (Alpha).

Source: www.kvraudio.com/product/omni-daw-by-tomasz-gluc
Download: https://omni.cba.pl

 

Total nightmare Yamaha Montage UI style...

 

I'll refrain from commenting on the quality of the software as it is very much work in progress, ASIO support is not built into the released Windows binaries, loading VST3 plugins crashes (and there's no plugin selection/scan so you have to load them manually) etc. etc. Still, some clever ideas (leaning heavily into Ableton/Bitwig-esque workflows, which I do like) and I wish them all the best.

But but... and here begins the rant section, feel free to ignore, and I do realize the web page is an entirely separate project probably handed by somebody apart from the DAW devs themselves, but why on earth have all the marketing catchphrases in already ("Synthesis beyond limits" etc.) when the software itself is far from complete. I think they're doing themselves and potential users wrong here. Somebody might look at it and think it's far more than what it is, be disappointed, and never look at it again.

Well, at least it's free and I do like their lack of AI tools. Something to keep an eye on definitely.

 

It isn't open-source yet, and it already looks terrible, I can't imagine how worse it will look once other programmers start jamming features into it... Unfortunately, the biggest issue with most free stuff is that programmers lack design sensitivities, and designers mostly don't work for free. That coming from a programmer that has some design sensitivities and has to work against other programmers that don't. That said, I hope it pulls through because we need free, open alternatives that work.

 

Ist Rust ready for performance oriented stuff?
Don't get me wrong, one day Rust compilers will be optimized to the level c compilers are now, but are we there yet?
I would care if Rusts more secure memory management would mean less crashes.. but projects like this show that Rust code is not more stable out of the box..
And yes I know, in theory an in Rust written synth is less likely to be owned by a malicious soundpatch.
But to be honest this is one of my lesser concerns about my machines security.

 

that whole nonsense is designed, promoted and coded using AI, so what do you expect?

it feels strange complaining about a free product, but it is what it is. just skip it and move on the the next offer.

that an open source project comes without source already tells you all you need to know about it.

 

...and where are the sources ?!?