A free and open-source music studio

PulseGrid Studio is now open source. Also: 150 instruments with drum kits you can build a beat from, a new playlist, a browser and master monitor in the style of FL Studio, a Settings window, and MIDI out for the instruments that came with your keyboard.

• 150 instruments, sorted by family. Drums, Keys, Mallets & Bells, Guitars, Bass, Strings, Brass & Winds, Voices, Synths, Pads and FX. The desktop apps add recorded instruments: pianos, organs, guitars, basses, a full orchestra, choirs and ten drum kits including an 808/909 kit. They come with the app, work offline, and are saved with your project and included when you export audio.
• Open source. The source code is on GitHub under the GNU GPL, version 3: read it, build it, change it and share your changes. Bug reports and pull requests are welcome.
• Drum kits you can build a beat with. Each kit has its own folder: the Drum Set adds its kick, snare, clap and hats as separate channels, so you click a beat in on the channel rack the way you do in FL; the Full Kit puts every drum on one channel, with each key of the piano roll named after its drum (on the computer keyboard, Z is the kick); and each drum is there on its own too. A kit's panel has 16 pads to hear it, or to change which drum a channel plays, and a list of kits to swap to.
• A new playlist. Tools like FL's (draw, delete and mute, so a clip can be silenced without removing it), a strip showing the whole song that you click or drag to move around, a ruler you drag to move the playhead, a zoom readout and a button that fits the whole song in the window. Tracks have a mute light, solo and a menu (colour, height, move, clear, delete; or right-click the track). Drag a pattern from the list onto a lane to place it, and double-click a clip to open its pattern.
• A piano roll that shows what's playing. Keys light up as their notes play, and as you play them on the computer keyboard or a MIDI keyboard; the notes under the playhead glow; the key of the row under your mouse is marked. Click and hold a key to hear it, and slide along the keys to play them in turn.
• Touchpads. In the piano roll and the playlist, two fingers scroll in any direction and a pinch zooms. A mouse wheel still zooms, as before.
• FX for builds and drops. Noise riser, downlifter, impact, sub drop, reverse crash and white noise sweep, plus reverse cymbal, orchestra hit and atmospheres.
• Hear it first, then add it. In the browser, a click plays an instrument or a sample so you can hear it; drag it onto the channel rack to add it. Drop a sample on a sample channel to swap its sound. You can still add from the channel rack and the Add menu. Imported and recorded audio goes into the sample list.
• A browser in the style of FL Studio. A row of icons across the top switches between Projects, Instruments, Samples, Keyboard & MIDI, Cloud sync and Demo projects. The instrument library is a searchable tree. Drag the browser's edge to make it wider.
• A header laid out like FL Studio's. The top row holds the menus, pattern and song mode, the transport, tempo and time, and a master monitor: an oscilloscope, a stereo peak meter with peak hold and a clip light, and a performance box with CPU load and its recent history, memory in use, the number of voices playing, and a warning if the sound drops out. The second row holds the hint panel, with the project's name and a hint for whatever you point at, then the windows, snap, the pattern and the master knobs.
• Choose what goes to the cloud, and delete projects. Only the projects you choose go to your cloud now: the cloud button beside a project in the Projects tab saves it there, open or not. The bin button deletes a project to the Recycle Bin, so you can get it back.
• A Settings window. Press F10 or choose Options → Settings: the audio output and latency, metronome volume, how hard the computer keyboard plays, the MIDI port and drum-pad channel, the theme and the size of the whole interface (desktop), and more.
• Panels that behave. Leave a panel partly out of view, or bring it near a side and it locks there. Resize from any edge or corner, double-click a title bar to maximise, and use the ▾ on each title bar for that panel's own menu. The channel rack's steps stretch to fill their panel, and its playhead now sits exactly over the playing step.
• Plugins: Wavetable Synth, MIDI Out and Sampler. A recorded instrument's panel lists the instruments by family, so you can swap to another one, and loads .sf2 SoundFont files of your own. MIDI Out sends a channel's notes to another program, for example the Akai Studio Instrument Collection that comes with the MPK mini IV, through a virtual MIDI cable such as loopMIDI.
• Better MIDI keyboard support. Keyboards with several ports, like the MPK mini IV, play without stray notes from their control ports, and a live MIDI monitor shows what each key, pad and knob sends.
• Menus like a desktop program, with shortcuts in their own column and flyouts, opening just under the menu bar, and staying signed in when you close the app.
• The mixer no longer writes "C" under every pan knob: a knob at the centre shows nothing, and one turned to a side shows how far (L20, R35).

PulseGrid Studio now runs on Mac.

• A Mac app. One .dmg download that works on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs (macOS 12 or newer). Open it, drag PulseGrid Studio into Applications, and right-click → Open the first time: the app isn't signed with an Apple Developer certificate yet, so macOS asks once. The Installing on a Mac steps in the download section cover the rest.
• Made for the Mac keyboard. Menus, tooltips and the shortcut list (F1) say ⌘, ⌥ and ⇧, and ⌘ works wherever Ctrl does. Text fields copy and paste, ⌘Q quits, and double-clicking a .pulsegrid file or signing in with Discord opens the right app.
• Updates on the Mac: the app checks for new versions as usual. When there is one, the menu bar shows Version X is available · Download, which opens the download page.
• The Windows app is unchanged apart from these shared improvements. It still updates itself.

The wavetable synth is now a plugin you can find.

• Add → Plugins → Wavetable Synth. Choose it from the Add menu (or the channel rack's Add list, then + Channel) and it creates the synth and opens it straight away. Plugins now have their own group at the top of the list; the thirteen starter sounds moved to Wavetable sounds.
• A button on every synth channel. The little wave button at the end of a synth channel's row opens, and closes, its sound editor. No more digging through the channel's settings.
• F8 opens the sound editor for the selected synth channel, and closes it again. Press F1 for the full list of shortcuts.
• The channel rack makes room for the new button, and the editor's title now says which synth you are editing.

A wavetable synthesizer, a new logo, and a new installer.

• A wavetable synth, in the style of Serum. In a synth channel's Edit sound…, switch the oscillators to Wavetable. Two wavetable oscillators (nine tables, from Basic Shapes and Pulse Width to Vowels, FM Sweep and Digital) with a live picture of the wave: drag across it, or turn Position, to morph the sound. Unison with detune and stereo width, a sub oscillator and noise, a filter with its own envelope and key tracking, and an extra modulation envelope (Env 2) and two LFOs.
• Drag a source onto a knob. Take Env 2, LFO 1, LFO 2, Velocity or Key from the bar at the top and drop it on any knob with a small dot, such as the wavetable position, cutoff, resonance, levels or volume. A ring on the knob shows how far it moves, and a list at the bottom lets you set how much, or take a link away. Up to eight links per sound. You can also click a source, then click a knob.
• Thirteen new wavetable sounds in a new Wavetable group of the instrument menu: supersaw, reese, wobble bass, vowel lead, FM pluck, glass pad, PWM strings, sync lead, digital bell, organ, brass and more. Open any of them in the editor and change it.
• A new logo. A new app icon, installer icon and website icon: a pulse rising to a peak over a faint step grid.
• A new installer. PulseGrid Studio now installs from an .msi file, just for you, with no administrator needed. Updates still arrive by themselves: the app downloads the new installer, checks it against a checksum and, when you press Restart to update, installs it and opens the new version. If you installed 1.2 or earlier with the old .exe, remove it under Settings → Apps first and install this one; your projects stay where they are.

Design your own sounds.

• A synthesizer for every synth channel. Open a synth channel's settings and press Edit sound…. Two oscillators with their own waveforms, unison and stereo width, a sub oscillator and noise, a filter with its own envelope and key tracking, a volume envelope you can see, FM, vibrato, tremolo, filter wobble and pitch drop. Start from any of the built-in sounds and change it, or build one from scratch. Your sound is saved inside the project, so it travels with it, cloud sync included. Back to preset undoes it, and every knob move can be undone.
• Smoother Discord sign-in in the Windows app. After you approve in Discord, your browser now shows a page that hands you back to PulseGrid Studio, instead of staying stuck on Discord.

Sign in with Discord.

• Continue with Discord. Under Cloud, choose Continue with Discord instead of typing an email and password. In the Windows app it opens your browser and brings you back signed in. If your Discord email matches an account you already made, you land in that same account with your projects. Cloud sync is still optional.