Helio Workstation is free and open-source music sequencer, designed to be used on all major platforms.

Why another sequencer?

Most of the DAW interfaces often seem overcomplicated, and they only tend to get more and more bloated over time. Many of them are commercial, proprietary-licensed and almost none of them support all major operating systems at the same time.

Helio is an attempt to rethink a music sequencer to create a tool that feels right.

It aims to be a modern music creation software, featuring linear-based/pattern-based sequencer with clean UI, integrated version control for synchronizing project between devices, translations to many languages, small portable builds and more; mainly targeted at hobbyist composers, game developers and indie artists.

Building

	Linux	Windows	macOS	iOS	Android
master
develop

Basic build instructions

• Clone with submodules: git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/helio-fm/helio-workstation.git.
• Install dependencies:
  • On Windows, get ASIO SDK (which can't be redistributed in this project due to licensing restrictions, but you may use ThirdParty/ASIO/get_asio_sdk.ps1 powershell script to download and extract the SDK source).
  • On Linux, you'll need to have the following packages installed: libfreetype6-dev libx11-dev libxinerama-dev libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxcomposite-dev mesa-common-dev freeglut3-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libasound2-dev libjack-dev libc++-dev; the makefile assumes you've set up either export CONFIG=Debug, export CONFIG=Release32 or export CONFIG=Release64 before you make.
• Pick the right project for your OS from the Projects directory and build.

Development builds

• Windows: ci.helio.fm/helio-dev-x64.zip
• macOS: ci.helio.fm/helio-dev.dmg
• Linux: ci.helio.fm/helio-dev-x64.tar.gz

Packaging Status

Links

• Homepage with all latest builds and its source code.
• Project page at KVR database.
• Some screencasts on Youtube.
• Discussion at HN.

Contributing

Helio is still a work in progress, and there are several ways you could help:

• Proofread and improve the translation for your native language.

• Maintain a package for your favourite Linux distro - highly appreciated, please see the list of available and missing packages here.

• Your thoughts on any usability improvements are welcome: friendly and lightweight UI is the main development priority in this project, so feel free to help me identify the main friction points.

• Implement new features: some guys were asking me if I have any tasks for them to start working on, but, as a sole unpaid developer with limited amount of time and interest, I'm not planning stories or organising the board, instead I only work on the parts that are fun and important for me at the moment. If you don't know where to start, my suggestion is that you do the same: find a missing feature or behavior you're lacking the most, and make the app a little more convinient for yourself. Anyway, feel free to ask questions and create incomplete PR's to get intermediate feedback.

Support the project

• Become a backer on Patreon
• Become a backer on OpenCollective
• DigitalOcean referral link

License

GNU GPL v3 © Peter Rudenko and contributors, see LICENSE for more information.

Icons taken from various free icon fonts are licensed under SIL Open Font License and CC-BY.

Built-in piano samples are the part of Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm, distributed under CC-BY.

All Helio logos and translations are distrubuted under CC-BY.

Translation and proofreading credits

Afrikaans - Jacques Viviers
Chinese - Bowen Sun
Italian - Claudio Stano, Riccardo Cariboni
Japanese - Kotone Itaya
Korean - YoungGwang Jeon, DaYeon Lee, HyoHee Jeon
Polish - Dawid Bugajski