20 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 Spleeter, Ultimate Vocal Remover and BackgroundMusic. appsgit lists 20, including free alternatives to GarageBand, Ableton Live and FL Studio, each with its platforms, license and install commands.
Updated Oct 28, 2026
Open Source DAWs, Audio Editors & Music Tools
Spleeter
deezer/spleeter
Deezer source separation library including pretrained models.
Maintained · last commit Jun 18, 2026
Audio & music productionWindowsUltimate Vocal Remover
Anjok07/ultimatevocalremovergui
GUI for a Vocal Remover that uses Deep Neural Networks.
Maintained · last commit Oct 6, 2026
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxBackgroundMusic
kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic
Background Music, a macOS audio utility: automatically pause your music, set individual apps' volumes and record system audio.
Maintained · last commit Jun 10, 2026
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.
Active · last commit Oct 28, 2026
OfficialAudio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxMuseScore
musescore/MuseScore
MuseScore is an open source and free music notation software.
Active · last commit Oct 28, 2026
OfficialAudio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxLMMS
LMMS/lmms
Cross-platform music production software.
Maintained · last commit Oct 25, 2026
OfficialAudio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxEasyeffects
wwmm/easyeffects
Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applications.
Maintained · last commit Oct 28, 2026
Audio & music productionLinuxMixxx
mixxxdj/mixxx
Mixxx is Free DJ software that gives you everything you need to perform live mixes.
Maintained · last commit Oct 25, 2026
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.
Maintained · last commit Oct 28, 2026
OfficialAudio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxPicard
metabrainz/picard
Picard is a cross-platform music tagger powered by the MusicBrainz database.
Active · last commit Oct 28, 2026
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSOpenless
Open-Less/openless
Hold a key, speak, release — AI-polished text appears at your cursor in any app.
Active · last commit Oct 28, 2026
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxDemucs
adefossez/demucs
Code for the paper Hybrid Spectrogram and Waveform Source Separation.
Maintained · last commit Oct 26, 2026
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxTypewhisper Mac
TypeWhisper/typewhisper-mac
Local speech-to-text for macOS on-device AI, fully private, optional cloud.
Active · last commit Oct 27, 2026
Audio & music productionmacOSGuitar
soramimi/Guitar
Note: This document was generated by AI. It may not accurately reflect the actual state of the project.
Active · last commit Oct 26, 2026
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.
Active · last commit Oct 26, 2026
Audio & music productionLinuxNightingale
rzru/nightingale
Machine learning powered Karaoke app (with scores!).
Active · last commit Oct 15, 2026
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxMuesli
Muesli-HQ/muesli
Muesli: agent-native local meeting transcription + dictation for macOS (Granola + WisprFlow alternative).
Active · last commit Oct 27, 2026
OfficialAudio & music productionmacOSHydrogen
hydrogen-music/hydrogen
The advanced drum machine for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Active · last commit Oct 3, 2026
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxVgmtrans
vgmtrans/vgmtrans
VGMTrans - a tool to convert proprietary, sequenced videogame music to industry-standard formats.
Maintained · last commit Oct 19, 2026
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinuxMurmure
Kieirra/murmure
Fully local, private and cross platform Speech-to-Text with LLM Post-processing.
Active · last commit Oct 27, 2026
Audio & music productionWindowsmacOSLinux
What are the best open-source audio and music apps?
By GitHub stars, Spleeter is the most popular (28,494 stars), followed by Ultimate Vocal Remover and BackgroundMusic. 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?
15 of the 20 open-source audio and music apps listed here run on Windows, 17 on macOS and 15 on Linux; on a Mac, the most starred is Ultimate Vocal Remover. 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 20 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.