A NEW fully featured DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATION for making modern and experimental music. No account. No subscription. No AI. Pay what you want and it is yours forever.
A NEW fully featured DIGITAL AUDIO WORKSTATION for making modern and experimental music. No account. No subscription. No AI. Pay what you want and it is yours forever.
Anything down to zero is fine. If you can’t pay right now, take it anyway — just promise to make something really fucking great.
ARCYN OnTrack is a full digital audio workstation. Not a plugin, not a companion app, not a lite version of something bigger you’ll eventually be upsold into. It’s a complete production environment: recording, sequencing, sound design, mixing, live performance, all in one program that runs entirely on your own machine.
Drag a sample in and it becomes raw material for anything. Chop it up and rearrange it. Time-stretch it into something else entirely. Turn it into a chromatic instrument and play it, or map it across your keyboard and piano roll as a rhythm instrument. Open it in the wave editor and manipulate it directly, or drop it into Corruption Lab and mangle the audio’s actual code — real databending, byte-level, with guardrails so you can wreck the sound without ever crashing the file.
Run it through effects. Stack stutters, delays, reverbs, filters — over 80 creative effects, with more being made every day by the developer AND the community. There are unlimited possibilities. Click and drag a loop in the arrangement area and build a custom control rack, and turn the whole thing into a live performance. Whatever you decide to do, RESAMPLE IT right back into your timeline with a single click. Then do it again... Welcome to ONTRACK.
That’s all possible because of the Rebound Engine, and it’s the whole instrument, not a feature bolted onto one. It’s a simple thing that the whole DAW process is built around. It’s always listening, so nothing you make by accident is ever lost — a knob twirled mid-thought, a filter sweep caught in motion, a take you almost threw away. Make. Pull it in. Make again from that. Repeat. It’s a feedback loop by design, and the more you cycle through it, the more it hands you back things you never would have planned for. That’s not a workaround for writer’s block. That’s the writing process here.
There’s no pressure with a retroactive recording process. Play something until it’s right and only import the last take when you totally nailed it. Make mistakes until something beautiful and accidental happens, then click resample to put it in the arrangement. This is how art happens. It’s a series of beautiful accidents presented alongside our intentional choices.
Also included is a full library of original instruments, a professional mixer, a modular controller rack and FX rack. Because instruments and effects are just JavaScript, our community can build anything they want here. With free dev guides included, OnTrack has the lowest barrier of any DAW for artists to build their own insane ideas from scratch. It’s a new way to make music, built from the ground up around the way art actually happens.
It’s not enough to just cut up loops and write notes. For the past 20+ years artists have been making micro adjustments at the note level in nearly every genre of music. Sadly, whole genres exist that depend on the sound of plugins because available DAWs never go deeper than the mixer.
You shouldn’t need to go outside the DAW you use for a feature that’s been a stable part of modern music for almost 30 years. All because the DAWs available haven’t improved the piano roll since the last century.
ONTRACK is different. In the lanes beneath the roll you can draw your effects into the grid. Absolute control of where each effect lands and for how long. If you really need to go deeper, you CAN BUILD YOUR OWN EFFECTS CHAINS inside the mixer. Just build a chain in a bus, connect to send. Now the trigger is immediately listed inside its own lane in the grid.
It’s easier to make complex music in ONTRACK than anywhere else. That’s by design, because ONTRACK grew from a software sampler into its current state. It was expanded again and again to be useful for modern digital creators who deserve better than a copy of a copy of a workflow from the 1960s — a workflow that simulated recording to reel-to-reel tape.
For a DNB, Jungle, IDM, Breakcore, Industrial, Djent, Fonk, or Hiphop artist the workflow is more sensible. It’s a drag-and-drop sample instrument with a timeline and a piano grid. A workhorse with all of the basics included, and a host of secret weapons found in the details. This software is a pure labor of love, and sometimes you will find that the coolest features were added not because they make the most users happy, but because they make sometimes ignored users more empowered and creative.
OnTrack plays nice with what you already own. MIDI keyboards and controllers, standard USB audio interfaces, even a game controller — plug it in and it’s a modulation source, driving knobs, pads, and morphs in real time. It records microphones, guitars, and hardware synths straight to a track, with take-stacking that never overwrites a performance you’re not ready to let go of, and a WAIT mode that catches the attack of your first note before the trigger even fires.
Inside the wave editor is an even more powerful and destructive tool. Inject, smear, shred, bitrot, decimate, infest and nuke your audio at the byte level — then undo it if you were wrong. Databending as a tool for chaotic and unpredictable results, but in ONTRACK it’s never an accident.
Spectrogram, goniometer, spectrum, oscilloscope, correlation and LUFS over the whole console. Make the bridge click-through and keep working underneath it.
It runs on a potato. Recycled, used, dumpster-dived — anything that can run a modern browser can run OnTrack, because it’s built on everyday web technology instead of a bloated native install. No cloud account. No internet connection required. No installer chain to break in five years.
Its UI is optimized to run on a small laptop screen without feeling like a handicap. The name ARCYN actually came from an inside joke about how hot laptops can get on stage. As a poor musician I know that not everyone has the means to buy new gear, and I promise that won’t stop you from using ONTRACK.
I use AI myself, in my own workflow, building this — the same way I’d use a compiler or a soldering iron. What I won’t do is put AI in your workflow, because it doesn’t belong there.
Creativity is an expression of you. Asking AI to create art for you is like asking someone else to go to therapy for you. This isn’t software to replace the creative process and it’s never going to be. Full stop.
It’s built by a single musician and electronic music educator. It is the product of thousands of hours of labor and a lifetime of love for the creative process.
So OnTrack will never train on your work, harvest your data, or profit from what you make. And this software, in general, will never:
Ownership is forever. Once it’s on your machine, it’s yours — no company can take it back, brick it, or sunset it out from under you. That’s not a marketing angle. That’s just how software used to work, and how I think it always should have.
Still in stability testing. I am very proud of it, but you will likely find occasional rough edges. Few if any of them will stop you from making great music — but some will, and I’m sorry in advance for those. I’m one guy doing his best.
I’ve put over 2,000 unpaid hours into this because building the DAW I always wanted has been a lifelong dream. If it’s useful to you, that support will literally feed my family.
Fuck art, make crime — Arcyn loves you