About DonutStudio
DonutStudio is a one-person project. A single independent developer in Denmark designs, codes, and maintains it. Every part of it, from the harmonic tuning engine and the C++ DSP to the singing-voice synthesis, the video engine, and the website you are reading now, is the work of one person who wanted a tool that treats musical notes as relationships.
Built by one person
The design, the C++ audio engine, the instruments and synthesis, the singing-voice engines, the GPU video editor, the modular node graph, the plugin and standalone builds, the documentation, and this site are all handled by a single developer. When you post in the Discord or send a support email, you are talking directly to the person who writes the code.
Why DonutStudio exists
DonutStudio lets you compose with pure harmonic ratios the way the ear hears them. You draw a tuning relationship between two notes, a perfect fifth as 3/2 or a natural seventh as 7/4, and the engine retunes them as exact frequencies. It began as the tool its author wanted and could not find.
The art is free. You only pay to go to market
Making a living from music is hard. Most people pay, often a lot, just to make music as a hobby, so charging for the art itself would be charging people for their craft. That is why the just-intonation engine, the composition tools, and the whole harmonic DAW are free, and always will be: a gift to anyone who wants to make music this way. What DonutStudio Pro charges for is the production layer that makes a piece commercially viable: per-note sampling, vocal synthesis, and the score-reactive Media Machine that take a finished composition to something you can release. You never pay to make music in DonutStudio. You only pay when DonutStudio helps it earn.
Grew into a workstation
From that harmonic piano roll it grew, year by year, into a full production environment built around the same idea: a sixteen-track instrument host, singing-voice synthesis, just-intonation score notation, a video editor with music-reactive visuals, and a modular patching graph, all of which keep your tuning intact.
Independent and unhurried
DonutStudio is self-funded and sets its own direction. Features land when they are right, the free tier stays free, and the project answers to the people who use it.
Made in Denmark, used everywhere
DonutStudio is developed in Denmark and used by composers, sound designers, and xenharmonic, microtonal, and EDO experimentalists around the world. It ships as a standalone app and as VST3 and CLAP plugins. Linux is the platform it is tested on most heavily; the Windows and macOS builds come off the same automated pipeline and improve with every release. DonutStudio is in active open beta, with new releases landing regularly.