Helio Workstation is free and open-source music sequencer, designed to be used on all major platforms.
Why another sequencer?
Most of the DAW interfaces often seem overcomplicated, and they only tend to get more and more bloated over time. Many of them are commercial, proprietary-licensed and almost none of them support all major operating systems at the same time.
Helio is an attempt to rethink a music sequencer to create a tool that feels right.
It aims to be a modern music creation software, featuring linear-based sequencer with a clean interface, high-performance C++ core, integrated version control providing intelligent synchronization between devices, saved undo history, translations to many languages and more.
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Recent Releases
3.1414 Nov 2024 13:01
minor bugfix:
The built-in SoundFont player now supports microtonal temperaments with no setup. - The built-in SoundFont player supports SF3 format with OGG/FLAC sample compression. - edge cases when converting between temperaments. - MIDI export for offbeat tracks. - Orchestra pit: the plugins list is now searchable, and table sorting is persistent. - Mobile platforms: added scrollable scale editor for microtonal temperaments for phone screens, added sidebar buttons for tuning and transposing clips in the pattern roll, enabled background audio on iOS. - misc annoyances: crashes on pasting empty/invalid data, undo after VCS checkouts, edge cases when switching the editable scope.
3.1312 May 2024 04:45
minor bugfix:
Added initial support for parametric modifiers: arpeggiators and most of the refactoring options can now be applied in a non-destructive way.
- Reworked note naming to be more compatible with traditional notation language, at least for chromatic scales in 12-tone temperament.
- arpeggiators so that they finally work as intended.
- sending events to MIDI output, also the 'MIDI output' instrument is now created automatically.
- Implemented drawing freeform lasso with Control-dragging.
- Added new UI flags to toggle following playhead, and to lock current zoom level and prevent auto-zooming.
- Double-pressing Space/Enter or long-tapping the play button speeds up playback by 1.5x.
- MIDI import now groups the imported events into tracks by channels and controller numbers.
- More QoL for mobile platforms, more SoundFont and LV2, more UI tidying up.
3.1222 Dec 2023 22:29
minor bugfix:
This is mostly a mobile release: reworked layouts for phone screens, SoundFont player, import/export crashes, added adaptive and themed icons on Android, reworked multi-touch (better late than never). - Added automations editor panel supporting hand-drawing custom curves with the pen tool. - Volume editor panel now also supports hand-drawing custom ramps and is more consistent with edit modes. - Both the piano roll and the pattern roll can display the volume editor and the automations editor. - Added support for MIDI channels (better late than never). - Piano roll: the lasso component cannot be zero-width or zero-height, dragged notes snap to the original note's beat, the default note length and volume are persisted. - Version control: switching to another version now works like a hard reset. - Added commands to shift tempo tracks 1 BPM up/down (hotkeys Shift + and Shift -). - re-adjusting MIDI input from 12-tone keyboards for microtonality. - The number of saved undo actions is now configurable. - Minor feature cutting: removed the updates info control, the legacy undocumented scale preview panel and the alternative spectrogram view.
3.104 Aug 2020 02:25
minor feature:
Minor renames
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Improvements in instrument management.
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Update the hopscotch map submodule.
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Update the iOS build image in Travis.
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Polish the "zoom to entire track" behavior.
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sizing for the empty clip components.
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zoom to track not working properly on empty tracks.
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Modernization: replace some common defines with constexprs.
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Get rid of some magic numbers.
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Pretty up more #defined defaults.
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Improve the lasso component's look and feel.
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Rework the range selection marker.
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Disable the user profile link button.
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Docs: add a note about range selection.
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Add boilerplate for invoking context menus with long right-click.
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Add context menus to piano and pattern rolls.
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an old and rare glitch in the selection component.
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Add context menus to version control page.
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Remove the auto triggering timeout in sub-menus, I'm starting to hate it.
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Get rid of redundant "set colour" sub-menus.
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Pretty up the menus.
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Add context menus to orchestra pit page.
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Add context menus to instrument routing page.
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Add hotkey to bring up the current instrument's window.
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Add "show instrument UI" menu items.
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Fine-tune the mouse clicks behavior in several places.
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menus positioning.
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Finishing touches on context menus.
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Renames for consistency.
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Update built-in translations.
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Bump project version, update JUCE.
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XCode warnings.
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Rollback the iOS build image to stable XCode version.
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iOS deployment script.
3.026 Jun 2020 17:05
minor feature:
Tidy up icon SVGs, add record/stop icons
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Remove the useless midi input callbacks for instruments.
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Add transport control component draft.
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Initial prettying up for the play/record buttons.
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Add midi recording methods boilerplate, transport listeners.
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Refactor the playhead component.
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Add hotkeys to trigger recording and playback+recording modes.
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Support loading the grouped hotkeys config format.
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Update hotkeys config layout: group by receivers for better readability.
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More UI prettying up.
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Remove a couple of unused legacy variables.
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Finishing touches for the recording mode UI.
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Add a combo in audio settings to select the MIDI device to record from.
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midi input settings, allow single choice of input device.
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Connect the instrument of the active track to midi input for preview.
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Update midi input settings serialization in audio core.
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audio settings not always updating.
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Add auto-detection for midi inputs.
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Add the midi inputs selection popup helper.
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Bloody refactoring: getting rid of percentage-based positions in tran .
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playhead movement after transport refactoring.
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Add the midi recorder class draft.
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Implement the basic midi recording logic.
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Make some undo actions a bit smarter.
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UI glitches when recording and following the playhead.
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Minor tidying up.
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some thread safety in transport callbacks.
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jumping at timeline anchors, broken after refactoring.
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Scaffold the quantization commands.
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Add the command palette button in the headline.
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Update the contributing section in readme.
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Implement quantization.
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Update the selection menus.
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Add quantization hotkeys.
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Refactor midi event ids.
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Refactor midi event component flags.
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Refactor colour ids.
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the progress spinner.
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Initial implementation of recording to the new track.
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quantization command captions.
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Sync pattern roll selection with piano roll edit scope.
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Minor cleanup and renames.
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Refactor the sequence range accessors.
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2.527 Feb 2020 08:45
minor feature:
Allow adding notes with modifier key in a dragging mode
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Make piano roll remember the last edited note length.
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Limit the min length of resized notes to the grid zoom level (resolves .
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Allow tweaking lengths of selected notes with hotkeys.
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Make all hotkeyed beat/length shifts depend on the zoom level.
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Feature-cut: remove one of the spectrogram views which I don't like.
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Refactor the undo stack and undo action ids.
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Add a hotkey to duplicate selected track.
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Re-save projects.
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Update track menus.
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Initial check-in for duplicating the selected track.
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Add tiny fancy fade-outs to the waveform monitor view.
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Tidy up a sidebar.
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Implement merging undo actions up to some named checkpoint.
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rare stupid crash in the volume map component.
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Implement duplicating tracks interactively.
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Make all dialogs draggable.
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Switch VS2015 debuild to 32-bit.
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Add a hotkey to shift the clip key offset by octave.
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Enable hardened runtime on macOS, re-save projects.
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Tidy up readme.
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Bump project version, update JUCE.
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Update change log.
2.412 Jan 2020 02:25
minor feature:
Make switching to system title bar less painful
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Switch to Xenial-based Clang release build in CI.
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Android CI build not to fail on PRs.
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Skip XCode builds on PRs, as they require code signing.
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Tune and refactor inertial zooming to make it feel more responsive.
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More performance fine-tuning.
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Allow to control volume ramping amount with mouse wheel.
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Refactoring to get rid of some ancient hacks.
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Cleanup the code and remove some redundant fadeouts.
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old with determining visible beats and bars.
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Disallow static null variables.
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Disable the custom exception handler, which was not used anyway.
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Get rid of legacy format serializer from v1.
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Clean up inertial zooming once more.
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Update JUCE.
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Preserve the correct view area in inactive roll on view range changes.
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Renames and refactoring.
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More unique pointer modernization for tooltips and dialogs.
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Add simple SerializedData class to move away from ValueTree.
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Update all serializers to use the new data class.
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signatures of all serialization methods.
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Re-save projects.
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Refactor loading methods.
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Remove another legacy workaround supporting the old file format.
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Clang builds.
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Add draft console component and hotkeys.
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Remove another useless method.
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Add fuzzy matcher and a couple of draft console action sources.
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Highlight matched glyphs in console search results.
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Pretty up text editors a bit.
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Access command palette modes by hotkeys and remember the last search.
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Rename command palette classes.
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Add more drafts for command palette action sources.
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Command palette to rely on context-dependent action providers.
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Overhaul command ids.
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rare notification with stash/pop stash.
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Load translations in a way that extends what's already loaded.
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Implement common actions for command palette.
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Implement timeline actions for command palette.
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projects list logic in command palette.
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Update hotkeys.
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Notarize and staple macOS builds if possible.
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Impro
2.315 Sep 2019 06:31
major feature:
Added support for aug/dim chords descriptions
Allow switching between custom and native title bar on Windows and Linux
Also display breadcrumbs in the title bar if possible to save some screen space
Added retrograde and melodic inversion to selection refactoring menu
Added shift-drag-to-copy for all timeline events
Go to next/previous anchor now jumps over clips in pattern mode
Reworked midi import, should fix importing controller tracks, key/time signatures and track names
Made plugins search less likely to stuck and cancellable with a click or escape keypress
helio team