Help make Xequence Audio open source
A comprehensive digital audio workstation, built over years, with no commercial future. I would rather give it to the world than let it rot on a drive.
3 people have chipped in · 26 days left · full refund if it ends under € 5,000
Why this is happening
Xequence launched on iOS in 2017 and did well. Xequence 2 is still on the App Store, still rated 4.5 / 5, and still earns a few quid a month. That app is not going anywhere and is not part of this campaign.
Xequence Audio is the other thing: a full browser-based DAW built on the same MIDI editing core, with a modular synth, a mixer and an audio engine on top. It works. You can use it right now.
It is however never going to ship as a commercial product. The market for an independent DAW is brutal, finishing and supporting it alone would take years I do not have, and the honest assessment is that continuing to sit on it achieves nothing for anybody.
Personal reasons
I live in a very suboptimal situation that affects my health. I'm suffering from chronic airway irritation and severe sleep deprivation that has been going on long enough to have impacted my ability to work. On a good day I have a few productive hours right now.
Releasing 50,000 lines of code properly, with build instructions, an architecture document and someone answering questions afterwards, is weeks of work. I cannot absorb weeks of unpaid work right now, and I frankly need the money.
I would rather say that plainly than putting it in fancy words about a strategic open-source initiative.
What your money buys
For scale: the audio engine, the modular synth, the mixer and all the editors are probably somewhere around five person-years of specialist work. Commissioning that from a development company would cost hundreds of thousands of euros.
The ask here is € 5,000, for all of it, released to everybody, permanently.
If the total reaches € 5,000, every donation is kept and used, and each threshold (see below) adds something concrete. If it ends under € 5,000, everyone gets a full refund.
€ 5,000
The code goes publicXequence Audio is published under the AGPLv3 in a public GitHub repository, with build instructions and an architecture document written for someone who has never seen the codebase. This happens as soon as the threshold is reached, not at the end of the campaign.
€ 10,000
Three months of meThree months of maintainer time after release: reviewing pull requests, triaging issues, and answering the questions that only the person who wrote it can answer. Realistically a couple of hours a week, best effort.
€ 15,000
WebMIDIThe existing MIDI implementation is comprehensive and well-tested, but currently iOS-only. At this level I port it to WebMIDI myself before handing over, so the released version can drive and be driven by real hardware out of the box.
Chromium browsers and Android only. Apple's Safari does not support WebMIDI, so this cannot work on iPhone or iPad.
€ 20,000
The mixer and synth on a phoneThe editors already work beautifully on a phone, however the mixer and the Hybris patch editor don't yet. At this level I redesign those two for small screens, so the whole thing is usable on a device you already carry.
If it stays under € 5,000: I will say so publicly and refund every donation, automatically, to the card it came from. In this case, the code would not get released.
Exactly what gets released
- The complete Xequence Audio source: roughly 50,000 lines of CoffeeScript across 38 modules, plus around 4,000 lines of CSS for the interface.
- The audio engine, the Hybris modular synth with all 34 module types and 66 presets, and all 23 insert effects.
- The arranger, pianoroll, controller editor, virtual keyboard and the rest of the MIDI editing suite.
- Build and run instructions, and an architecture document explaining how the audio graph, voice allocation and scheduling work.
- A public GitHub repository.
The editing parts are already fully documented in the Xequence 2 manual.
What does not
- Xequence 2 for iOS. The native Objective-C layer, the Xcode project and the platform glue stay closed, and the app stays on the App Store as a paid product. It is a separate product with a separate licensing situation, including the closed Ableton LinkKit SDK, and dragging it in would make this campaign slower, messier and legally murkier for no benefit.
- The demo content. The songs, samples and impulse responses used in the demos are not part of the release.
The license
AGPLv3.
Main reason over GPLv3: if you change Xequence Audio and let other people use it over a network, you have to publish your changes.
Plain GPL only asks for that when you hand someone a copy of the software. The AGPL removes any argument about what counts as handing over a copy when the software runs in a browser.
Who owns what
I wrote all of the existing code, so the copyright on it stays with me. That means a company that cannot use copyleft code can still buy an ordinary commercial licence for it from me. This is the only way this project could ever earn anything again, and it takes nothing away from anyone.
Your contributions are yours. There is no contributor agreement to sign and no rights to hand over. Anything you contribute stays under the AGPL, with your name on it. I will not sell your work.
Contributions are signed off with a
Developer Certificate of Origin,
the same one-line Signed-off-by: the Linux kernel uses.
Reasonable questions
Why should I pay for something I will be able to get for free?
Because whether it exists at all depends on you. Below € 5,000, there is nothing. Above it, the further we get, the more supported and capable Xequence Audio will become.
You are giving away a DAW but still selling Xequence 2 on the App Store. Isn't that having it both ways?
I wrote all of this code, so I am allowed to license it more than one way. The web version goes out under the AGPL. The iOS app stays where it is, at the same price.
The iOS app came first, in 2017, and earns me about € 250 a month. That is not much, but it is real money that I live on, and taking it away would not help anyone. Nobody who bought it loses anything.
What you get for free is the larger thing: the whole DAW, the synth, the mixer, the effects and the same editors.
Code that other people contribute obviously stays in the open project. I will not take community contributions and put them into the paid app.
Who maintains it after you stop?
Honestly: whoever turns up. What I can do is make turning up as easy as possible, which is why the architecture document and the build instructions are included. The code is straightforward procedural CoffeeScript with descriptive names and no weird framework stuff, and it has no dependencies at all.
CoffeeScript, in 2026?
Yes. It compiles to readable JavaScript, and anyone who wants to run
decaffeinate over the whole thing on day one is welcome to (or just ask your favourite LLM).
I would actually suggest doing that before any other work.
What happens if your health gets worse?
The € 5,000 release is the first thing that happens, and it happens the moment the threshold is crossed. Once the code is public it cannot be un-published, whatever happens afterwards!
Are there rewards, tiers, perks, backer editions?
No. But if you want your name in a
CREDITS file in the repository, say so when you donate and
it goes in!
Why not Kickstarter?
Kickstarter is built around delivering products to backers, and "release code that already exists" seems like it could be against the rules. Running it here means no platform review, no rejection risk, and lower fees.
Can my company sponsor this properly?
Yes, and it would help enormously. If your company benefits from a production-grade WebAudio codebase existing in the open, get in touch at info@seven.systems and we can talk about a sponsorship and how you are credited.
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