22 open-source audio and music apps
Open Source DAWs, Audio Editors & Music Tools
The most popular open-source audio and music apps for Windows, macOS and Linux on GitHub are VoiceStudio, Spleeter and Ultimate Vocal Remover. appsgit lists 22, including free alternatives to GarageBand, Ableton Live and FL Studio, each with its platforms, license and install commands.
Updated Oct 8, 2026
Open Source DAWs, Audio Editors & Music Tools
VoiceStudio
debpalash/VoiceStudio
VoiceStudio is the open-source, fully-local ElevenLabs alternative — voice cloning, voice design, video dubbing, dictation, transcription & audiobook creation in 646 languages.
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxSpleeter
deezer/spleeter
Deezer source separation library including pretrained models.
Audio & music productionWindowsUltimate Vocal Remover
Anjok07/ultimatevocalremovergui
GUI for a Vocal Remover that uses Deep Neural Networks.
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxBackgroundMusic
kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic
Background Music, a macOS audio utility: automatically pause your music, set individual apps' volumes and record system audio.
Audio & music productionmacOSAudacity
audacity/audacity
Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems.
OfficialAudio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxMuseScore
musescore/MuseScore
MuseScore is an open source and free music notation software.
OfficialAudio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxLMMS
LMMS/lmms
Cross-platform music production software.
OfficialAudio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxEasyeffects
wwmm/easyeffects
Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications.
Audio & music productionLinuxMixxx
mixxxdj/mixxx
Mixxx is Free DJ software that gives you everything you need to perform live mixes.
OfficialAudio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxArdour
Ardour/ardour
Ardour is a digital audio workstation for recording, editing and mixing multi-track audio and MIDI on Linux, macOS and Windows.
OfficialAudio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxPicard
metabrainz/picard
Picard is a cross-platform music tagger powered by the MusicBrainz database.
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSOpenless
Open-Less/openless
Hold a key, speak, release — AI-polished text appears at your cursor in any app.
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxDemucs
adefossez/demucs
Code for the paper Hybrid Spectrogram and Waveform Source Separation.
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxPiano Trainer
ZaneH/piano-trainer
Memorize piano scales with ease! A piano practice program w/ MIDI support.
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxTypewhisper Mac
TypeWhisper/typewhisper-mac
Local speech-to-text for macOS on-device AI, fully private, optional cloud.
Audio & music productionmacOSGuitar
soramimi/Guitar
Note: This document was generated by AI. It may not accurately reflect the actual state of the project.
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxDsnote
mkiol/dsnote
Speech Note Linux app. Note taking, reading and translating with offline Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine translation.
Audio & music productionLinuxNightingale
rzru/nightingale
Machine learning powered Karaoke app (with scores!).
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxMuesli
Muesli-HQ/muesli
Muesli: agent-native local meeting transcription + dictation for macOS (Granola + WisprFlow alternative).
OfficialAudio & music productionmacOSHydrogen
hydrogen-music/hydrogen
The advanced drum machine for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxVgmtrans
vgmtrans/vgmtrans
VGMTrans - a tool to convert proprietary, sequenced videogame music to industry-standard formats.
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxMurmure
Kieirra/murmure
Fully local, private and cross platform Speech-to-Text with LLM Post-processing.
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinux
What are the best open-source audio and music apps?
By GitHub stars, VoiceStudio is the most popular (54,778 stars), followed by Spleeter and Ultimate Vocal Remover. People often use these instead of GarageBand, Ableton Live and FL Studio. Each page lists the platforms, license and last commit.
Which of these run on Windows, Mac and Linux?
17 of the 22 open-source audio and music apps listed here run on Windows, 19 on macOS and 17 on Linux; on a Mac, the most starred is VoiceStudio. 6 can be installed with a package manager such as Flathub, Homebrew, winget or Chocolatey.
Are these open-source audio and music apps free?
Yes. All 22 use an open-source license (OSI-approved or FSF-free), so you can use, copy and change them for free.
How are these open-source audio and music apps chosen?
Apps come from desktop awesome lists (Awesome Linux Software, awesome-mac, awesome-windows, awesome-electron and the media and file sections of awesome-cli-apps), more than 70 GitHub topics such as desktop-app, electron-app, tauri-app, gtk, qt, macos-app, pdf-editor, cad and remote-desktop, and a hand-picked list of flagship apps. An app is listed only if it has a license (one GitHub detects, or one appsgit checked by hand), a README and a commit in the last six months, is not archived or a fork, and has 1000+ GitHub stars (topics), 500+ (awesome lists) or 100+ (hand-picked). It must also be an end-user application with a desktop signal: installers in its releases, install instructions for Windows, macOS or Linux, or a Flathub, Homebrew, winget, Chocolatey, Snap or AUR package. Libraries, frameworks, themes, plugins and servers are left out, and source-available apps are labelled as such.