SoundCraft: ArtCraft's Free Pro Tools Alternative, Online

SoundCraft is a digital audio workstation from the team behind ArtCraft, the group that released free, open-source counterparts to Photoshop, Word, Excel, AutoCAD and other Adobe, Microsoft and Autodesk apps in October 2026. The GitHub description calls it a clean-room reimplementation of Avid Pro Tools, rebuilt in pure Rust. Clean-room means it was built from public specifications and observed behaviour, not from Avid code, and the README says SoundCraft is not affiliated with or endorsed by Avid.

The workflow is Pro Tools-shaped on purpose: an Edit window with tracks and clips, Shuffle, Slip, Spot and Grid edit modes, the Smart Tool, a big transport with Bars|Beats and timecode rulers, and a mixer with sends and busses. One Rust codebase runs natively on macOS, Windows and Linux and compiles to WebAssembly for the browser; the README claims a parallel mix engine and a 120 fps UI.

Our test of the web build opened a sample session — Midnight Groove, 48 kHz, 24-bit, 9 tracks — with waveforms rendered, tracks armed and the transport ready. For a browser tab, that is not a normal sight.

SoundCraft vs Pro Tools is a question of where your audio lives. For files already on your computer, editing and mixing are genuinely there: the edit modes, automation, plugin set and bounce chain all work. What is missing is the studio edge — MIDI hardware, low-latency duplex recording and Pro Tools session interchange, all named alpha blockers.

The table below turns the SoundCraft README and its ranked gap list into simple marks. Pro Tools keeps a yes on hardware and interchange; SoundCraft wins the last row outright.

Editing is the foundation: Shuffle, Slip, Spot and Grid modes; Smart, Selector, Grabber, Trim, Pencil and Zoom tools; clips that fade, crossfade, nudge and quantize to grid. The transport understands Bars|Beats, Min:Secs, timecode at every rate including drop-frame, and samples.

Mixing is real: fader and pan with full automation (Write, Touch, Latch and more), pre and post sends, busses, aux inputs and master faders. The built-in plugin set covers a 7-band and 1-band EQ, compressor/limiter, expander/gate, de-esser and maximizer. MIDI is present as instrument tracks with a piano-roll editor, velocity lane and event list.

Files and delivery round it out: WAV/BWF/RF64, AIFF/AIFC and FLAC in and out; decoding for MP3, Ogg, AAC, ALAC and more; bounce to WAV, AIFF or FLAC at 16/24/32-bit float with dither. Recording supports punch-in and loop workflows on the desktop build. If you map the family, SoundCraft is the Pro Tools sibling; our Adobe clone story covers the whole suite.

The quickest way is our hosted copy of the official web build — a free Pro Tools alternative online with no account. Click the button at the top of this page or open SoundCraft online. The first visit downloads about 6 MB, then the workstation opens in a new tab with a sample session loaded. SoundCraft online works best in desktop Chrome or Edge.

Step 1: press the spacebar to play the sample session and hear the mix. Step 2: drag a clip in Grid mode and watch it snap to the Bars|Beats ruler. Step 3: open a track’s sends and route it to an aux, then automate the fader with Touch mode.

Step 4: import your own audio with File, then Import — WAV, AIFF and FLAC are the safest formats. There is no autosave in the web build, so save often: Save downloads a session copy, because the browser cannot write over your original. Recording through an audio interface belongs to the desktop build, not the browser.

Get every SoundCraft download from the SoundCraft releases on GitHub or the SoundCraft page on getartcraft.com. SoundCraft v0.6.1 was published on Oct 12, 2026, five days after the repository appeared — audio engineers picked it up fast, so check the tag before you bookmark an installer.

On Windows there are MSI installers and portable zips for x64, ARM64 and 32-bit x86. On macOS there is one universal DMG, plus a separate command-line tool. Linux users get AppImage, Flatpak, deb, rpm and tar.gz builds for x86_64 and ARM64, plus a RISC-V tarball, and FreeBSD has its own build.

The web build is a static site zip; that is the file PSDraw hosts, unchanged and checksum-verified. Every release includes SHA256SUMS.txt, so compare the checksum before you install. Our ArtCraft download guide walks through the checksum step for every ArtCraft app.

The SoundCraft GitHub repository is github.com/storytold/soundcraft, under the same storytold account as PhotoCraft and the other Crafting Apps. It was created on Oct 7, 2026 and passed 2,600 stars within a week — audio engineers noticed fast, because a browser-run Pro Tools-style DAW is not something the open-source world had.

The code is offered under your choice of MIT or Apache-2.0. The ArtCraft name and logo are trademarks outside that license, and our ArtCraft open source guide explains the fork rules. The gap list ranks its blockers in the open, from MIDI hardware to session interchange, and doubles as the public roadmap.

SoundCraft is also scriptable: the same commands drive the UI, a CLI, a JSON control channel and an MCP server, so an agent can reach the same mixing surface you click. Our ArtCraft MCP guide shows how to point Claude, Codex or Cursor at it.

The gap list marks the studio edges as alpha blockers: there is no MIDI device input or output, no channel routing or low-latency duplex path (device and buffer choice exist; ASIO is opt-in), and no session exchange with Pro Tools — no AAF, OMF or .ptx.

Ecosystem and depth gaps follow: third-party VST3s are blocked in the signed macOS build and AU editors are missing, the built-in plugin catalogue is thin and unverified, and roughly 25 open correctness bugs touch features counted as done. Recording decodes sources whole into RAM, so long sessions are memory-hungry. Localization is English-only.

Two limits are specific to SoundCraft online. Save downloads a session copy instead of writing over your original. And SoundCraft is built for desktop: on a phone it may be slow or not open at all. Mix in the SoundCraft browser build freely, but track through the desktop app until MIDI hardware support lands.

The SoundCraft web build runs in any modern desktop browser on WebAssembly. The project’s hosting notes say the build needs no cross-origin isolation headers, so plain static hosting is enough — that is how we serve it.

Desktop Chrome and Edge are what we verified for SoundCraft online on Oct 14, 2026, and they matter more for audio than usual: browser audio latency varies by platform and interface. Wired headphones or monitors beat Bluetooth for latency in every browser we tried SoundCraft in. Firefox and Safari can run WebAssembly builds of this kind, but the project does not claim they are tested.

Phones and tablets are not the target: a DAW needs a wide timeline, a mouse and keyboard shortcuts. The launch block on this page warns mobile visitors for that reason. A portable recorder or a laptop DAW remains the right tool for capturing audio on the go.