soundcraft/ROADMAP.md

SoundCraft roadmap

SoundCraft is a clean-room, pure-Rust digital audio workstation that aims at full parity with Avid Pro Tools, and then beyond it: faster, open, scriptable and agent-controllable. This file is the honest status: what works today, what is missing, and how far we are.

Where we are (2026-10-07)

Measure	Value	How
Menu-catalog parity (engine + UI)	482 / 512 menu items (94 %); engine alone 397 / 512, see docs/parity.md	cargo xtask parity compares the incumbent's 512 menu leaves (names observed black-box) with our command registry. Most of what is left is Avid's online services (sign-in, cloud projects, collaboration, Splice, Learn), Dolby Atmos-specific items, HEAT and ARA
Estimated overall feature parity	~65 %	judgement across the areas below, weighted by how much working engineers rely on them. Menu items are only the surface; depth (editing feel, plugin catalogue, MIDI and score editing, video) is where the gap is
Distance to an alpha	~85 % there, ~12–18 wall-clock hours of Claude Opus 5.5 work	see Alpha below
Distance to 100 % parity	~110–150 wall-clock hours of Claude Opus 5.5 work with a single agent; roughly 40–55 hours with 3–4 agents in parallel (the last three features in this session were built in parallel this way)	sum of the per-area estimates below

Area by area

Area	Status	Parity	Remaining (h)
Session model, save/load, undo	Tracks, playlists, clips, fades, clip gain, automation, markers, groups, busses, video; JSON .scraft + Audio Files folder; plugin state; autosave; copy-on-write undo with gesture coalescing	85 %	8
Audio file I/O	WAV/BWF/RF64, AIFF/AIFC, FLAC (read/write); MP3, OGG, AAC, ALAC, CAF (read); peaks. Whole files are decoded into memory: disk streaming for very long sessions is still to do	70 %	12
Editing	Slip/Shuffle/Spot/Grid, cut/copy/paste/clear/duplicate/repeat/shift, Paste Special (merge MIDI, markers, clip gain/effects), separate/heal/trim/consolidate/strip silence, fades & crossfades, nudge, playlists with comping, every tool gesture, edit groups, clip groups (and .scgrp import/export)	75 %	20
Mixer & routing	Faders, pan, mute/solo (SIP, implicit solo), sends pre/post, busses, aux inputs, master faders, VCAs, routing folders, 10 inserts, plugin delay compensation, clip effects, preamp/instrument/object views	75 %	15
Automation	Breakpoint lanes for volume/pan/mute/sends/plugin params, trim automation; live Write/Touch/Latch passes; write/thin/glide/convert/coalesce. Surround-pan automation is still to do	60 %	15
Plugins (built-in)	26 original processors + 2 instruments, AudioSuite offline processing for the whole AudioSuite menu	45 %	30
Third-party plugins	CLAP, VST3 and Audio Units (macOS): audio, parameters, latency, notes, state saved in sessions, instances created/destroyed off the audio thread, editors (floating CLAP GUIs, VST3 views on macOS, verified with Melodyne). Missing: AU editors, embedded CLAP GUIs, VST3 editors on Windows/Linux, ARA	80 %	10
MIDI & notation	MIDI/instrument tracks, SMF import/export, MIDI editor (piano roll, velocity, rubber-band select, keyboard transpose/move), event list, step input, quantize/transpose/velocity/duration, real-time properties, Score Editor, MusicXML export (Sibelius) and printable SVG score	55 %	20
Recording	Input capture, punch in/out (selection, on the fly, pre/post-roll), loop record into playlists, input monitoring through the channel strip, autosave and recovery	60 %	10
Elastic Audio / TCE / Beat Detective	Pitch-preserving warp on Elastic tracks, TCE to timeline, conform to tempo, Beat Detective and Identify Beat windows; audio-to-MIDI pitch detection	45 %	15
Surround	Main and bus formats from stereo to 9.1.6 and Ambisonics, surround panner with divergence/centre/LFE/height, ITU fold-down, multichannel bounce, Renderer window, object/bed routing	60 %	12
Video	Picture track with thumbnails, Video and Video Universe windows, H.264 (Baseline/Main/High), ProRes (all flavours) and Motion JPEG decoders in pure Rust, sync offset, relinking. Missing: HEVC/AV1/DNx, timecode-track placement, video export	55 %	15
UI fidelity	Edit + Mix windows, toolbar, rulers, track headers, menus for the whole catalog, floating windows, dialogs (every file command has a path prompt), command palette	70 %	20
Agent control	CLI, JSON control channel, MCP server (headless + bridged), offscreen UI renders	90 % (ahead of the incumbent)	3
Release engineering	Signed macOS universal, Windows x64/x86, Linux AppImage/deb/rpm/tar/Flatpak, FreeBSD, Web/WASM on every push to release	80 %	3

Alpha

An alpha is a build people can download, open the demo or their own audio in, record, edit, mix and bounce without crashes or lost work. Feature-wise SoundCraft is past that bar; what is left is shipping and hardening:

1. Publish the repository and cut the first release (needs a decision from the maintainers: the GitHub repo, the release secrets, and a push to the release branch). The pipelines exist but have never run end to end. ~2 h once unblocked, mostly fixing what the first run finds.
2. Platform smoke tests of the installers on Windows, Linux and FreeBSD (only macOS has been exercised by hand). ~3–4 h.
3. Disk streaming of long sources, so an hour-long multitrack session does not need all of its audio in RAM. ~5–6 h.
4. A hands-on QA pass in the live app: recording on real interfaces, long sessions, plugin-heavy mixes, save/reopen loops. ~3–4 h.
5. Docs: a short user guide next to the existing agent/CLI docs. ~1 h.

Robustness

Property tests drive random edit sequences (with full undo), mutated session files and hostile command parameters through the engine and mixer; they have caught fade, overflow and unbounded-allocation bugs. Every command also runs with empty parameters on empty and demo sessions. Hosted plugins live in isolated unsafe crates (clap-host, vst3-host, au-host) and are created, loaded and destroyed off the audio thread. The video decoders survive hundreds of mutated and truncated movies.

Current focus

1. The alpha list above.
2. Surround-pan automation; AU editor views.
3. Built-in plugin depth (more processors, better UIs).
4. MIDI and score editing depth.

Milestones

• M0–M4 (done): workspace, gates, model, IO, DSP, mix engine, command engine, Edit/Mix UI, realtime playback, metering, plugins, bounce.
• M5 (done): editing depth (tools, modes, playlists, fades, comping, clip groups).
• M6 (done for the first cut): recording, punch, loop record, monitoring.
• M7 (in progress): MIDI and notation editing.
• M8 (done): CLI, control channel, MCP, agent acceptance test.
• M9 (in progress): AudioSuite breadth (done), Elastic Audio, Beat Detective.
• M10 (next): alpha release on all platforms.
• M11 (mostly done): third-party plugin hosting (CLAP, VST3, AU), video, surround.