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MarbbleAlpha

0.1.0-alpha.1

Released 2026-10-29. See on GitHub

The first prerelease. Everything below is new.

Added

Section titled “Added”
  • Recording: audio from any input, mono or stereo per track, with live waveforms and latency compensation from the measured round trip plus a manual Recording Delay; MIDI with controllers, pitch bend and aftertouch; count-in and pre-roll; cycle recording into take folders; Autopunch; on top, new track or replace for overlapping recordings.
  • Take folders and comping: Quick Swipe Comping with crossfaded boundaries; Flatten, Flatten and Merge, Pack and Unpack.
  • Tracks area: move, trim, split, join, loop, fade, gain, reverse, colour, copy, paste, repeat, nudge and Alt-drag copy; rubber-band selection; Smart snap; a click without a drag moves the playhead (Settings › Editing › Click Moves Playhead).
  • Tracks: audio, instrument and aux tracks; folder and summing stacks; groups; hidden tracks; Track Freeze.
  • Tempo and markers: Tempo and Signature global tracks with tempo changes, linear ramps and signature changes, followed by the grid, click, quantize, plug-ins and MIDI files; Move MIDI Regions with Tempo; a Marker track and Marker List.
  • Editors: Piano Roll with eight tools, Time Quantize with strength and swing, scale quantize, humanize and a velocity/controller lane; Audio Track Editor with range edits, normalize, fades to selection and Split at Transients; Standard MIDI File import and export.
  • Mixing: channel strips with an eight-band Channel EQ and analyzer, eight Audio FX slots, eight pre- or post-fader sends, aux buses and output routing; plug-in delay compensation on every path, with Low Latency Mode.
  • Automation: volume, pan, mute, send levels and plug-in parameters, in Off, Read, Touch, Latch and Write modes.
  • Plug-ins: VST3 instruments and effects, scanned out of process with a scan report; Marbble Synth; copy and paste of plug-ins (VST3 state included) and Channel EQ settings from the right-click menus; dragging plug-ins between Audio FX slots to reorder them, move them to another strip, or copy them with Alt.
  • Built-in effects: Compressor (Platinum Digital, Studio VCA, Studio FET, Classic Opto and Vintage Vari-Mu circuits), Limiter, Noise Gate, De-Esser, Reverb, Delay, Tuner and Loudness Meter, with their own panels, automation, side-chain input from any track (Compressor, Noise Gate, De-Esser), latency reported to delay compensation, and freeze support.
  • Presets: factory and user presets for every built-in effect and the Channel EQ. User presets are files in the config folder’s presets/ and are shared by every project.
  • Bounce and export: offline Bounce of the project or a section, Export All Tracks, Export Region, Bounce in Place; 16-bit dithered, 24-bit or 32-bit float WAV.
  • Projects: .marbble folders with readable project.json; Project Chooser with templates; autosave and crash recovery; undo for every edit (100 steps by default).
  • Interface: Logic Pro 11’s layout; five themes; interface scaling from 90 to 200 %; four waveform styles; rebindable key commands, shown the way each platform writes them; Musical Typing.
  • Real-time safety: wait-free rtrb queues between the session and the audio thread; a panic in the engine silences one block instead of crashing; every plug-in’s output is checked, NaNs are silenced, runaway levels are clamped, and a message names the plug-in.
  • Denormals: the audio thread runs with flush-to-zero (and denormals-are-zero on x86_64), so decaying signals no longer slow DSP down about a hundredfold.
  • Overload protection: when callbacks run late back to back for 60 ms, the engine outputs silence for 250 ms without processing, stops playback or recording, and shows “System overload…”. Before, the kernel killed the app (SIGXCPU, RLIMIT_RTTIME). Offline renders are exempt.
  • Tuner: gates on its DC-blocked level, so an interface’s DC offset doesn’t run the detector.
  • About Marbble in the Marbble menu, with the version.
  • Platforms and packaging: Linux x86_64 and aarch64 (AppImage and .deb; .rpm from the first stable release, since RPM versions can’t carry a prerelease suffix) and a Nix flake, Windows (NSIS installer, x64) and macOS (.dmg for Apple Silicon and Intel), built and published by GitHub Actions; CI on all three; scripts/set-version.sh sets the version everywhere.

Known issues

Section titled “Known issues”
  • VST3 editor windows open only on Linux (X11, through XWayland on Wayland). On Windows and macOS plug-ins load, play and can be automated, but show no editor.
  • Windows and macOS builds are early and less tested. Only the system’s default audio driver is available there (WASAPI, Core Audio; no ASIO).
  • The builds are unsigned: macOS needs right-click › Open (or xattr -cr), Windows SmartScreen needs More info › Run anyway.
  • Automation lanes of a plug-in dragged to another track stay on the old track and no longer drive it.
  • No crossfades, fade curve shapes, drag modes (X-Fade, Shuffle) or Marquee tool.
  • Regions stay at fixed sample positions when the tempo changes; only MIDI can follow (Move MIDI Regions with Tempo).
  • A built-in effect’s side-chain key is always post-fader; VST3 side-chain buses are not connected.
  • AAC/M4A imports can start about 40 ms late (encoder delay not fully trimmed).
  • The takes_check headless check “autopunch trims the take” fails about one run in five, from the null audio device’s timing.