Jackdaw Release DELAYED

2026-08-17

Jackdaw is a free, keyboard-focused Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), currently in progress. Source code and a user manual are available on github.

Background

I wrote in a previous post and elsewhere that I planned to officially release v1 of Jackdaw this summer.

What then began as scattered whispers of anticipation soon coalesced into an ecstatic murmur heard all across the country. A new DAW? Free and open-source? Within days, the murmur swelled to an impatient clamor. Keyboard-focused? Less clicking around? Celebrity musicians and producers unleashed a torrent of tweets. The clamor became a cacophony. Made “from scratch”? Written in the C programming language? Brick-and-mortar DAW stores everywhere were forced to post notices: NO JACKDAW YET, and JACKDAW NOT SOLD HERE (why such stores would stock a free DAW is beyond me) but the hoard was undeterred and the DAW stores boarded their windows. Overwhelmed with press inquiries, I cut my phone line and commissioned the excavation of a moat around my Brooklyn apartment. But I am not inattentive to my obligations; I owe you, the general public, an explanation.

Life update

The main impetus for the original summer deadline was that while I was working on Jackdaw full-time, I didn’t have much time left over to seek normal paid work, and my savings would only last for so long. My plan was to get the v1 release done, then focus on finding a job, and ultimately continue work on Jackdaw at a more leisurely pace (albeit restricted to nights and weekends) after securing a paycheck.

Instead, through good fortune and the support of individuals in my life and of the Recurse Center organization and community, I wound up with two jobs I’m really excited about, earlier than expected.

In April, I started part-time work doing field service on automatic transfer switches (ATS) in large facilities – mostly hospitals – all around NYC. Please wish me luck while I monkey around with 480v in the sub-sub-basement.

This summer, I started working as a software engineer at Electra Research. Electra makes a battery-assisted induction stove that plugs into a regular 120v outlet. It’s my first true programming job, and I couldn’t have asked for a better fit.

DELAY

With the original impetus for an earlier release now gone, and my time much more constrained, I will not release v1 of Jackdaw this summer. I would rather wait to do a release that I feel really good about than try to rush one. I don’t know when it will happen, but I will keep you posted.

You can use it anyway

This is all kind of immaterial, because Jackdaw is already publicly available. On MacOS or Linux, open a terminal, and run the following commands (the part after the dollar sign):

$ git clone https://github.com/chvolow24/jackdaw.git
$ cd jackdaw
$ make

make will build Jackdaw on your computer from the source code, which may take a few minutes. If the program is built successfully, you should see a “build summary” at the end. Then run:

$ ./jackdaw

and the program will open. If you run into problems, please email me.

There are more details on the build process here.

There’s also a fairly comprehensive user manual. I hope to add an interactive tutorial and make some demo videos for the official release; in the meantime, I apologize for the learning curve.

Progress

I have less time to work on Jackdaw lately, but I’m still working. Since my last post, the following features have been added to Jackdaw:

  • “audio routes”, which can be used like mix buses and for parallel processing
  • a pitch-shifter effect
  • a vibrato effect
  • a greatly-improved build system
  • a visually-explicit cursor (it now glows yellow), which should clarify some of Jackdaw’s core functionality

All of the above changes are on the main branch already. Changes not yet on the main branch include:

  • the addition of FFmpeg libraries (libavcodec, libavformat, etc.) as dependencies. (With the new build system, existing copies of these libraries found on your system are used by default, and if they don’t exist, FFmpeg is pulled in as a submodule and built locally. Nothing is ever installed on your system during the build process.)
  • load audio files of just about any type into a Jackdaw project (demuxing/decoding courtesy of FFmpeg)
  • project audio (audio stored in a .jdaw file) is FLAC-compressed by default (encoding courtesy of FFmpeg), reducing file size.
  • a lot more rigor around saving files in general:
    • you are always prompted to confirm before overwriting an existing file, unless it is the current project file
    • Jackdaw tracks whether or not there are unsaved changes to the current project
    • you are prompted to save the current project (or skip) before opening a different Jackdaw project, if there are unsaved changes
    • a quick “save” option is now bound to C-s (ctrl-s, or cmd-s), and “save as” is C-S-s (ctrl-shift-s, or cmd-shift-s).
  • context menus (right click menus)

More to come!

published by charlie on 2026-08-17