tuidaw

Digital Audio Workstation for Terminal & Browser

A full-featured DAW with a TUI and a Web UI, built with OpenTUI, Vue 3.6 Vapor, and miniaudio. Practice guitar at half speed without pitch shift. Record multi-track audio. Export mixdowns. From your terminal or browser.

Try the Web UI

Features

• Two UIs -- terminal (TUI) and browser (Web), sharing the same audio engine
• Braille waveform display -- 2x4 dot grid rendering in TUI, Canvas 2D in Web
• Native audio engine -- miniaudio C library via Bun FFI (TUI) or WebAssembly (Web)
• WSOLA time-stretch -- pitch-preserving speed control (0.25x - 2.0x)
• Multi-track recording -- simultaneous capture with per-track input device selection
• Metronome click -- sample-accurate, configurable volume and pan
• Loop regions -- sample-accurate looping
• Beat-based timeline -- navigate by beats/bars, auto BPM detection on import
• WAV import -- 16/24/32-bit, stereo downmix, automatic 48kHz resampling
• Project save/open -- .tuidaw project files (interoperable between TUI and Web)
• Export mixdown -- WAV export via ffmpeg (TUI) or offline WASM render (Web)
• Mouse & touch controls -- scroll, volume, pan via mouse wheel or touch

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/crossatko/tuidaw.git
cd tuidaw
./setup.sh
bun run start

The setup script will check for required system dependencies, download the Zig 0.14.0 toolchain, install JS dependencies, and build the native audio library.

# Pre-built binary (x86_64 Linux)

If you're on x86_64 Linux, the repo ships a pre-built native library. You can skip the native build:

git clone https://github.com/crossatko/tuidaw.git
cd tuidaw
bun install
bun run start

# TUI Requirements

• Bun (JavaScript runtime)
• Linux (x86_64 or aarch64) or macOS (x86_64 or aarch64)
• A terminal with Unicode support (Ghostty, Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, etc.)
• ffmpeg -- for export mixdown
• zenity -- for file dialogs (Linux only)

Web UI

The Web UI runs entirely in the browser -- no server-side audio processing. The same C audio engine is compiled to WebAssembly via Emscripten, and miniaudio uses the Web Audio backend automatically.

• Works on desktop and mobile browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
• Uses your device's microphone for recording (permission requested on first use)
• Projects saved in the browser are fully compatible with the TUI and vice versa
• PWA installable -- works offline after first load

# Self-hosting

# Development (Vite dev server on port 3666)
bun run dev

# Production build
bun run build:web
# Serve web/dist/ with any static file server
# COOP/COEP headers required for SharedArrayBuffer

Keyboard Shortcuts

Press F1 in the TUI for the full reference.

Mouse Controls

Try the Web UI