A focused music studio for turning an idea into a finished track.
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Important
Rhino is in mid-alpha. It is ready for experimentation and feedback, not production-critical work. The current build path is Windows only; the first production release, with installers for Windows and macOS, is targeted for December 2026–January 2027.
Rhino is a native desktop DAW built for electronic music, sound design, and fast arrangement. Record audio or MIDI, shape parts directly on the timeline, build device chains, and finish the mix without leaving one focused workspace.
It is written in C++20 with JUCE and Tracktion Engine, with immediate pointer response and smooth visual feedback treated as core features—not finishing touches.
The arrangement keeps tracks, browser, transport, and editing tools in one focused workspace.
Create MIDI clips directly on the arrangement, draw and edit notes in the step grid, play instruments from a MIDI controller or the computer keyboard, and shape ideas with Rhino Arp. Region-based cut, copy, paste, duplicate, split, and undo keep larger arrangements quick to edit.
Rhino Arp turns held notes into scale-aware patterns without leaving the track's device chain.
Record MIDI and audio into dedicated track types, choose inputs per track, set monitoring to Off, Auto, or In, and use a one-to-four-bar count-in. Takes become ordinary timeline clips, ready to move, trim, split, and process.
Import samples and recordings, then adjust clip gain, pan, pitch, fades, reverse, and mute. Time warp follows project tempo with modes for beats, tones, textures, complex material, and repitch; warp markers handle performances that drift.
Rhino includes instruments, a Drum Rack with a pad on every note, sampled and synthesised kits, and a sample editor that slices a loop across pads, MIDI effects, and audio effects in a drag-and-drop browser. The independent Rhino Forge synth adds wavetable and spectral synthesis, deep modulation, an arpeggiator, flexible routing, and effects as a VST3 or standalone app.
Tab, or the DJ switch beside the transport, swaps the arrangement for up to six CDJ-style decks around a mixer. A deck plays an audio file, or a track or group of the song bounced to audio and bounced again as you edit it, with hot cues, loops, beat jump, a jog wheel that scratches and nudges, sync and quantised starts; the mixer follows the DJM-V10, with a four-band EQ, a compressor, a colour filter and a send on every channel, a mic with talkover, a send/return unit, a crossfader and fourteen beat effects. A track deck's instrument can be played live from the keys over it, which is how a Drum Rack joins a set. The lower pane follows the focused deck, so its clip and its devices are a press away, and Space plays that deck while the view shows. Each console carries its track's clip slots: double-click a cell for a one-bar clip, drag clips between the timeline and the consoles across the view switch, and drop samples and sounds on a cell. Experimental.
Every audio and MIDI track has volume, pan, mute, solo, devices, automation, and routing. Group tracks into real bus tracks, process the main output, and use built-in tools including Rhino EQ, Rhino Tune, Rhino Vocoder, Utility, and sidechain routing.
The foundations are working: arrangement editing, audio and MIDI recording, project save/open, offline WAV export, track groups, automation, VST3 hosting, built-in devices, and a tested native audio model.
Some production workflows are still being completed. Projects reference imported media in place, plugin discovery is limited, recording has no comping or loop-take workflow yet, and the DJ view, which took the place of a clip-launching session view, is experimental. macOS remains unvalidated until the release build and installer work begins.
Keep backups of anything important and expect project compatibility to change during alpha development.
There is no installer during alpha. A source build takes four tools and a few commands.
- Git and Git LFS
- Python 3.12 or newer
- CMake 3.24 or newer
- Visual Studio 2022 with Desktop development with C++ and a Windows SDK
Open PowerShell and run:
git lfs install
git clone https://github.com/monkjuice/Rhino.git
Set-Location Rhino
python native/scripts/fetch-dependencies.py
cmake -S native -B native/build -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64
cmake --build native/build --config Release --parallel 2The dependency script downloads Rhino's pinned JUCE and Tracktion Engine revisions into the ignored native/.deps directory.
& ".\native\build\RhinoNative_artefacts\Release\RhinoDAW.exe"On first launch, open Edit → Audio settings and choose your audio device, sample rate, buffer size, and inputs.
Forge is built separately, using the JUCE checkout fetched above:
cmake -S instruments/rhino-forge -B instruments/rhino-forge/build -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64
cmake --build instruments/rhino-forge/build --config Release --parallel 2 -- /p:BuildInParallel=falseRhino discovers the development VST3 automatically. You can also run Forge by itself from:
instruments/rhino-forge/build/RhinoForge_artefacts/Release/Standalone/Rhino Forge.exe
ctest --test-dir native/build -C Release --output-on-failure
ctest --test-dir instruments/rhino-forge/build -C Release -j 8 --output-on-failureThe detailed build notes, architecture, component guides, decisions, and known gotchas live in the Rhino wiki. Start with the project overview, building Rhino, or building Forge.
| Today | Production target |
|---|---|
| Windows source builds | Windows installer |
| macOS architecture kept portable but unvalidated | macOS installer |
| Mid-alpha project format and workflows | Production-ready release |
Rhino is developed at github.com/monkjuice/Rhino.