glacier

A DAW built from scratch in Rust as a deliberate learning project. No frameworks — raw wgpu, CPAL, and winit.

status

Glacier is a working DAW with real rough edges. Expect some UI/interaction bugs as active development continues. Core sequencing, playlist arrangement, and playback all work end-to-end; the project is being actively refactored and hardened rather than considered finished. Issues and PRs pointing out bugs are genuinely useful right now. If anyone wants to help me with this project feel free to join and chat: https://discord.gg/YdDbmBzeZT

getting started

Glacier is a Cargo workspace with two crates: glacier-app (the application) and glacier-dsp (DSP utilities).

Linux build dependency: cpal's ALSA backend requires the ALSA development headers to build:

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install libasound2-dev

# Fedora
sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel

No additional system packages are required on Windows or macOS.

git clone https://github.com/remysedlak/glacier.git
cd glacier
cargo run --release

Always use --release — debug builds can be slow enough that per-sample DSP math misses the audio callback deadline, producing audible glitches and buffer underrun/overrun errors that don't occur in release. This isn't a bug, it's debug-build overhead.

Requires a working audio output device (via CPAL) and a Vulkan/Metal/DX12-capable GPU (via wgpu).

To open an existing project, click the project icon and pick a .toml project file (see assets/projects/ for an example). A blank default project loads on first run.

features

Step sequencer, piano roll, multi-pattern playlist arrangement, mixer with per-track volume/mute, and a fully custom-rendered UI (own windowing, text rendering, and icon pipeline on raw wgpu — no GUI framework). Runtime .wav loading, TOML project save/load.

Full feature list and architecture docs: https://glacier.remy.rs

stack

wgpu · winit · CPAL · fontdue · ringbuf · hound · serde/toml · rfd · resvg · dirs · showfile · log/env_logger