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NorthlightNorthlight
The Northlight mark, a half moon rising over the sea

Music belongs to everyone.

So should the tools for making it. Northlight is a studio for recording, arranging and mixing music, free for anyone to use for any purpose, with code that anyone can read, change and share.
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Northlight with a song open: tracks and their MIDI clips in the arrange view, the mixer below and the inspector on the right.
Northern Drift, the demo song, in the arrange view and the mixer.

Why Northlight

The freedom to make music

Section titled “The freedom to make music”

Recording a song used to need a studio. Now it needs a computer and the right software, and the right software usually comes with a price, a subscription, or an account that can be closed. Whether you get to make music shouldn’t depend on any of that.

Northlight is a complete studio that costs nothing and belongs to the people who use it.

Free for everyone

No price, no subscription, no account and no trial that runs out. Download it and it is yours to keep.

For any purpose

Make an album, score a film, teach a class, sell what you record. Your music is yours, and Northlight asks nothing of it.

Open to read and change

The source code is public under the GNU AGPLv3. Study how it works, change it, build it yourself and share what you make of it.

Made in the open

Plans, bugs and decisions are public on GitHub, where anyone can follow them and anyone can take part.

A pale moon over a field of wheat and cornflowers at dusk.

A computer and the wish to make something should be enough.

Photograph: Gytis Bukauskas, Unsplash

What it does

Free, not cut down

Section titled “Free, not cut down”

Northlight is built for real work, from recording a band at low latency and comping the best take to delivering a finished master. Here are a few of the things it does.

Vocal pitch editing

Section titled “Vocal pitch editing”

Northlight finds every note in a sung part. Move a note, split or join notes, or correct the whole take towards the key, and quieten the breaths between phrases. A correction moves a note’s centre but keeps the singer’s vibrato and the slides between notes, so it still sounds like them. Every edit can be changed or undone later.

The pitch editor: a vocal take's notes drawn as blocks on a piano roll, with the sung pitch traced through each one and two notes labelled with how far off the key they are in cents.
A vocal take in the pitch editor, corrected towards A major.

Instruments to start with

Section titled “Instruments to start with”

You don’t need to buy anything to start writing. Northlight comes with Pulsar, a drum synth; Aurora, for basses and keys; Nebula, for slow, drifting pads; Starbit, a chiptune synth; and a sampler for your own sounds. When you want more, it runs your VST3 and CLAP plugins too.

Pulsar, Northlight's drum synth: eight pads with their sounds drawn as waveforms, and controls for the kick.
Pulsar, the drum synth.

A mixer that keeps up

Section titled “A mixer that keeps up”

Send to reverb and echo on FX tracks, group tracks into buses, and automate anything. Meters show what’s really there, and plugin delays are compensated so everything stays in time. When the mix is done, export to WAV, AIFF, FLAC or Ogg, with loudness normalisation.

The mixer: a channel strip for each track with faders, meters, pan and sends, and FX tracks for reverb and echo.
The mixer for the demo song, with Hall and Echo FX tracks.

A channel strip on every track

Section titled “A channel strip on every track”

Every track and bus has a gate, EQ, compressor, de-esser, saturation and limiter built in, ready to switch on. Each one shows what it’s doing as you play: the EQ curve, the compressor’s gain reduction over time, the saturation curve. Drag them into any order, or start from a preset for vocals, guitars, drums or the mix bus.

The channel strip: six modules side by side, a gate, a six-band EQ with its curve, a compressor with its transfer curve and gain reduction history, a de-esser, tape saturation with its curve, and a limiter, each showing the drums as they play, with the spectrum under the EQ curve.
The channel strip on the drums, with every module switched on, as the song plays.
The Northlight pledgeWhat we believe, and the promises we make to everyone who uses Northlight.
Join inReport a bug, suggest an idea, improve the manual or write code. Everyone is welcome.