The Anklang Project

Anklang Screenshot

Digital Audio Creation

Welcome to Anklang, a digital audio synthesis application for live creation and composition of music or other audio material. This project presents a revamp of several former audio projects by its two main authors Tim Janik and Stefan Westerfeld. It aims to realize a coherent, solid amalgamation for composition and interactive creation of synthesis music. The source code is released as Free Software, licensed under the MPL-2.0 and runs under Linux.

Documentation and Articles

Anklang provides reference documentation, introductions, further readings and the projects it is based on have been covered at conferences and in a number of articles:

Support

Help around Anklang and contact to the community can be accessed in a variety of ways:

Downloads

Anklang releases are available as source code archives and binary AppImage executables. The source code is licensed MPL-2.0, and the project uses Git for distributed source code development.

Anklang Releases: anklang/releases/
Release News: news.html

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome, graphical artists, musicians, translators, programmers can all help the project, just chat with us or contact us via the issue tracker.

Financial support is also appreciated, ideally through consulting of the developers:

Development

The Anklang development source code and issue tracker are hosted at Github. The Anklang project is split into two major components, the user interface which is implemented with web technologies, and the synthesis engine which is implemented in C++.

Here is a collection of development related resources:

Updates & History

This is the news section that gives an overview of Anklang releases and related events of significance in the project.

Anklang 0.2.0

Wednesday 06th September 2023

Version 0.2.0 of Anklang has just been released, with significant improvements to audio synthesis capabilities and user interface. The documentation has been improved in several places, and automated generation was integrated into the CI.

Audio synthesis enhancements include support for new CLAP (draft) extensions, such as transport information and file references. We now support non-linear mappings for BlepSynth ADSR times, and a new audio plugin Freeverb by Jezar at Dreampoint was added, with fixes to the damping mode in the original version. Additionally, a Jack PCM driver based on Stefan Westerfelds’ code was integrated.

Performance improvements were achieved by adding a new optimizing memory allocator and supporting low-latency scheduling via sched_* or RtKit. Saving projects will now automatically create backups of recent versions.

The user interface has also seen significant improvements in this release. These include context help via F1 key in various UI components, fixes to mouse wheel sensitivity for modern browsers, improved tooltips and note editing in the piano roll. The UI can now be zoomed via new menu entries, the color palette was updated, and integration of TypeScript annotations allowed improving the UI JavaScript code quality.

In terms of packaging, AppImage builds saw major compatibility improvements, and we increased the frequency of Nightly releases, building from nearly all significant trunk merge commits. We aim to generate more regular releases in the future instead of having lots of Nightly builds between regular releases.

The source code and binary packages for Anklang 0.2.0 can be found here: https://github.com/tim-janik/anklang/releases/tag/v0.2.0

CLAP - CLever Audio Plug-in API

Wedneday 15th June 2022

Last week the CLAP-1.0.0 version got tagged by the CLAP project and LWN ran an article about it.

Today several projects (and a number high profile companies) announced interest in supporting CLAP for their DAW and plugin developments: u-he - CLAP Announcement

Work on supporting CLAP for Anklang also started last weekend. The CLAP API is farily straight forward and Anklang can already find and load the Beta version plugins listed in the announcement.

Related threads on KVR can be found here:

About CLAP - KVR Audio
CLAP 1.0 betas for ACE, Diva, Hive, MFM 2.5 - KVR Audio

Anklang 0.1.0

Tuesday 26nd July 2022

Version 0.1.0 of Anklang has just been released.

With version 0.1.0, Anklang provides a MIDI sequencer, Undo/Redo capabilities for note editing, real-time synthesis, and support for CLAP plugins.

The real-time sound engine is implemented in C++, the UI runs in Electronjs, Firefox or Chrome. Assistance with development, porting or creative efforts is very welcome.

The source code and binary packages are available here:

https://github.com/tim-janik/anklang/releases/tag/v0.1.0

Anklang 0.0.1-alpha1

Monday 22nd November 2021

A first pre-release of Anklang is available now. This wraps up a good year of development to reshape the code base into something sane, modern and extensible.

This release provides an AppImage and a Debian package. These should run on at least Ubuntu 20.04, which is also the recommended build environment.

As of now, Anklang supports the ALSA MIDI and ALSA PCM drivers, very basic note editing and clip playback, and an interesting BlepSynth implementation by Stefan Westerfeld.

The Anklang UI can be run based on Electron (just start anklang after installation). Or, for the adventurous, the UI can run in the web browser by starting the synthesis engine directly. This requires the installation path, i.e. start it with something similar to: /usr/local/lib/anklang-0-0/lib/AnklangSynthEngine-0.0.1

https://github.com/tim-janik/anklang/releases/tag/v0.0.1-alpha1

First Anklang Website

Thursday 17th November 2021

The Anklang website, home of the Anklang project, is now live. While the Github README.md page makes it easy to give a static overview of the installation and source code development, the website can cover everything related to the project beyond the technicalities.

Historic Screencast

Tuesday 27th June 2017

Back in 2017, Stefan Westerfeld gave an overview of Beast 0.11 with the Gtk+ user interface. The codebase of Beast has had major influences on the implementation of Anklang.

Screencast Video
Screencast demonstrating the use of the song view, mixer view, pianoroll, synthesis instruments, soundfonts and effects in the Beast project with a Gtk+ based UI.