nota

Nota

A free music studio for macOS, Windows and Linux. No subscription, no account, no feature tiers — just open it and make music.

 

 

▶ Watch the demo with sound (1:45, YouTube)

Why Nota

Free, for good. Open source, no paid edition, no "upgrade to unlock".

Arrange and jam. A linear Arrangement timeline and a clip-launching Session

grid, with material moving freely between them — plus a Modular view for patching modulation by cable.

A full kit out of the box. ~35 built-in instruments and effects: subtractive,

wavetable, FM, granular and physical-modelling synths, a drum machine, EQ, compressors, reverbs, delays, saturation, arpeggiator, chord and scale tools, racks with macros.

Your plugins too. VST3 on every platform, Audio Units on macOS. Popular free plugins

(Surge XT, Dexed, Dragonfly Reverb …) install in one click from Settings.

Your phone is a controller. Scan a QR code and play pads, keys and an XY pad, or ride

the mixer — over Wi-Fi or USB, nothing to install.

Easy on the eyes. A calm Studio look: neutral greys, one orange accent for what is

playing or chosen. Dark or light, or the warm Ember themes, and your phone follows along.

Works where you do. The same app on macOS, Windows and Linux, on Intel/AMD and ARM.

Screenshots

Arrangement — the song, with the selected track's devices below

Modular — patch LFOs and modulators onto any parameter

Piano roll — draw, then arpeggiate, strum or ornament in one click

Built-in devices — every one draws what it does to the sound

Mixer — faders, sends and live meters

Downloads — 200+ free open-source plugins, one click to install

Studio Light — the same look in light greys, for daytime sessions

Colour themes — Studio or Ember, dark or light, or follow the system

Features

A quick digest — see FEATURES.md for the full, categorised list.

Three views — Arrangement timeline, Session clip grid, and a Modular

signal-graph editor with CV modulation (LFO / envelope follower / MIDI→CV / ADSR / Macro / Math, patched onto any parameter).

Tracks & mixer — audio, MIDI, group (nestable), return and master tracks; sends;

MIDI routing between tracks; peak/RMS and true-peak meters.

MIDI — piano roll with quantize and velocity; play from a MIDI keyboard, the computer

keyboard, a gamepad (macOS) or your phone; drag in .mid files; turn audio into MIDI (melody / harmony / drums / slice).

Audio — record from inputs and internal buses; import WAV/AIFF/FLAC/MP3; fades, gain

and per-clip envelopes; warp / time-stretch.

Automation & MIDI Learn — draw or record automation on any parameter; map hardware

knobs to almost anything.

Browser — preview presets, drum kits, effects and samples before you load them.

Version history — every save is kept; go back to any earlier version of a song, or

branch off from it.

Export — the master or stems to WAV (16/24-bit or 32-bit float), with true-peak

normalize and dither.

Colour themes — Studio Dark (the default), Studio Light, Ember Graphite and

Ember Paper; pick one, or follow the system's dark / light mode. Nota Remote on your phone wears the same theme.

AI control (optional) — a local MCP server lets an AI assistant such as Claude work

in the open project. Off by default.

Install

Download the file for your system from the latest release:

First launch

Nota isn't signed with a paid Apple or Microsoft certificate yet, so the system asks you to confirm the first time:

macOS — see Opening Nota on macOS below.

Windows — if SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC", click More info →

Run anyway.

Linux — make the AppImage executable (chmod +x Nota-.AppImage, or Properties →

Permissions in your file manager) and run it.

Opening Nota on macOS

Open the downloaded .dmg and drag Nota into Applications.

Open Nota from Applications. The first time, macOS stops it with

"Nota" Not Opened — Apple could not verify "Nota" is free of malware… (older macOS: "Nota" can't be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software). Click Done — not Move to Trash.

Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and scroll down to Security. You'll see

"Nota" was blocked to protect your Mac. Click Open Anyway, confirm with your password or Touch ID, then click Open Anyway once more.

That's it — from now on Nota opens like any other app.

Still won't open, or macOS says Nota "is damaged"?

That message is the same check with scarier wording — the download isn't actually broken. Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities) and run:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Nota.app

This removes the "downloaded from the internet" mark from Nota only. Then open Nota normally.

On macOS 13–14 there's also a shortcut for step 3: in Finder, right-click (or Control-click) Nota in Applications → Open → Open.

Why the extra step? Signing an app so macOS trusts it right away needs a paid Apple developer certificate, which Nota doesn't have yet. Nota is open source and built in public by GitHub Actions from the code in this repository.

Nota checks for updates itself and shows what's new after each update.

Status

New to Nota? The user manual (English and Russian) walks through every view and device.

Nota is young and moving fast — new releases come out every week or so (see the changelog). It's already used to make real music, but expect rough edges. Found a bug or missing something? Open an issue — every report gets read. Want to help with code? Start with a good first issue. Every change needs an issue approved by a core contributor first (the approved label) — pull requests without one are closed unreviewed. Ask before you build; see Start with an approved issue. Development here is spec-driven: non-trivial changes start as a written spec in specs/ — requirements, plan and tasks before any code — following the Spec Kit workflow in CONTRIBUTING.md. Questions, ideas or music to share? Join the Discord server.

For plugin developers

Nota has its own plugin registry — nota-daw/nota-plugins-registry — the list of open-source VST3 plugins that Nota installs from Settings → Downloads. Add yours with a pull request and every Nota user can install it in one click; the registry's README explains what gets in and how.

Building from source

The audio engine and DSP are a portable C++20 core; the UI is .NET 10 / Avalonia 12 (C#); plugin hosting runs through JUCE, isolated in its own module so the engine core stays JUCE-free.

git clone https://github.com/nota-daw/nota.git
cd nota
scripts/build.sh            # Build on macOS.
scripts/build-linux.sh      # Build on Linux.
scripts/build-win.ps1       # Build on Windows.
dotnet run --project src/managed/Nota.App

BUILD.md — prerequisites per platform, manual builds, packaging installers

and AppImages.

ARCHITECTURE.md — how the engine, the C ABI and the app fit together.

CONTRIBUTING.md — contributing, licensing your work, and the

real-time rules.

specs/ — the spec-driven development workflow for non-trivial changes;

see CONTRIBUTING.md and the worked example in specs/000-example/.

About

Nota is made by Egor Khindikaynen aka Ambertape (music). It started as a tool I built for my own music and was later opened up as open source. Most of the code was written with AI assistance, with every design decision, the sound and the workflow guided and shaped by me.

License

Licensed under AGPL-3.0-only — see LICENSES/ for the terms, and LICENSES/third-party.md for the dependency register.

Nota links JUCE, which is AGPLv3, so the open build is AGPL rather than GPL — see LICENSES/README.md.

[](https://www.greptile.com/?utm_source=oss_badge&utm_medium=readme&utm_campaign=greptile_for_open_source)