Dawsons

An AI-native desktop DAW. Upload a song and get it back as an editable project — separated stems, tempo, key, chords, and structure. Sing or hum an idea and turn it into any instrument's performance.

The DAW UI is the interface; a structured Musical Scene Graph (see docs/SCENE_GRAPH.md) is the source of truth that every analysis, edit, and render operates on — never raw waveforms.

See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full system design and the current phase roadmap.

Architecture at a glance

React (desktop UI) ──invoke()──> Rust (Tauri backend)
                                   │        │
                          audio engine   HTTP (localhost)
                        (cpal + symphonia)  │
                                            ▼
                                  Python AI sidecar (FastAPI)
                                  Demucs · librosa · custom chord/section detection

Rust owns the canonical Scene Graph (persisted to SQLite). The Python sidecar is a stateless local compute service: it returns analysis results, Rust validates/merges/persists them, and the UI renders from Rust's state.

Prerequisites

• Rust (stable toolchain)
• Node.js 20+ and npm
• Python 3.10+
• Platform build tools for Tauri — see the Tauri prerequisites guide for your OS (on macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools)

Getting started

./scripts/setup_dev.sh      # installs frontend deps, sets up the Python venv
./scripts/download_models.sh  # fetches AI model weights into a local cache (not in git)
cd apps/desktop && npm run tauri dev

The AI sidecar is spawned and supervised automatically by the desktop app — you don't need to start it separately in normal use. To run it standalone for sidecar development: see services/ai-sidecar/README.md.

Repo layout

• apps/desktop/ — Tauri + React desktop app (the DAW shell, real-time audio engine, Scene Graph persistence)
• services/ai-sidecar/ — Python FastAPI service running the analysis pipeline (stem separation, tempo/key/chord/section detection)
• packages/scene-graph-schema/ — the versioned Scene Graph JSON Schema and its generated TypeScript/Rust/Python types — the contract every other package depends on
• scripts/ — dev setup and model-download scripts
• docs/ — architecture docs and architecture decision records (ADRs)

Development workflow

The initial scaffold was pushed directly to main. From here on, work happens on feature branches with PRs (feat/<milestone-name>), even for solo development, so each change is independently reviewable and CI-gated.

License

Proprietary — see LICENSE. Third-party open-source dependencies are used under their own licenses — see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. Only dependencies that are free to use in closed-source commercial software are used; see that file for what was deliberately excluded and why.