RustTracker 🎵🦀

A high-performance, real-time audio visualizer and tracker module player built in Rust. Because your eyes deserve to hear the music too, and because I wanted an excuse to do something in Rust.

RustTracker leverages a 3-Thread DSP Architecture and Hardware-Accelerated Compute Shaders to ensure zero-latency audio playback while simultaneously computing GPU-accelerated Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) on each spatial audio channel. It renders beautiful, fluid visualizations at a buttery-smooth high framerates.

Supported formats include all the best ones; .MOD, .S3M, .IT, and .XM!. Lossless formats such as FLAC, WAV. And of course, your everyday MP3. It even supports video files and bitstreaming/passthrough for proprietary formats like Dolby Atmos, DTS-HD, etc.

Visualizations

RustTracker includes an array of WGPU-accelerated visualizations. It's like the 90s, but with way more teraflops.

Photorealistic Ferrofluid	Multi-Channel 3D Fire

CRT Oscilloscope	Frequency Spectrum

Features

• Advanced Visualizers: High-fidelity, cinematic shaders mapped tightly to precise acoustic frequencies. Prepare to be mesmerized.
• GPU-Accelerated FFT: We offload audio-reactive spatial weights directly to the GPU using WGPU compute shaders because your CPU is busy enough.
• Cinematic Video Integration & HDR: Features integrated hardware-accelerated video stream playback, rendering vibrant visual environments with HDR color precision.
• Real-time Tracker UI: Seamlessly decodes and visualizes .mod files, rendering a classic piano-roll style pattern editor. It aligns perfectly with the audio playback, complete with flawless cross-pattern scrolling and jumping.
• Graceful Degradation: Supports playing standard audio/video files (.mp3, .flac, .mp4, .mkv, etc.) or capturing live microphone input (--mic). It instantly adapts the UI to remove tracker elements and focus on acoustic analysis. It's smart like that.

Performance & Architecture

RustTracker is designed to be blazingly fast and utterly relentless when it comes to performance.

• Audio Thread (cpal): A lock-free, ultra-high-priority thread dedicated solely to IO. It pushes audio buffers like its life depends on it, preventing stuttering and audio underruns.
• DSP Thread: A background worker that computes windowing and frequency history data. It does the heavy mathematical lifting without ever daring to block the audio stream.
• GPU Render Pipeline (wgpu + egui): Low-overhead, high-performance hardware rendering that talks directly to your graphics card, bypassing the slow lane.

Quick Start

Run a tracker module (and prepare to groove):

cargo run -- path/to/your_file.mod

Run with live microphone input (try whistling):

cargo run -- --mic

Linux Installation

RustTracker provides pre-compiled AppImages, RPM, and DEB packages via the Releases page, because we know compiling from source isn't everyone's idea of a fun Friday night.

Steam Deck (AppImage)

1. Download RustTracker-SteamDeck-GamePad.AppImage in Desktop Mode.
2. Mark it as executable (Properties -> Permissions -> Is executable).
3. Add to Steam and launch in Gaming Mode for native Gamepad support. (To force Gamepad Mode in Desktop Mode, hold the Start (Menu) button for 3 seconds. It's a secret to everybody.)

RPM / DEB Packages

Install the downloaded packages using your native package manager:

• Fedora/RHEL: sudo dnf install ./RustTracker-Linux*.rpm
• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo dpkg -i ./RustTracker-Linux*.deb

Building Packages from Source

If compiling from source is your idea of a fun Friday night, install the necessary dependencies and go wild:

For RPM (Fedora):

sudo dnf install -y gcc gcc-c++ binutils pkgconfig alsa-lib-devel wayland-devel libX11-devel libxkbcommon-devel systemd-devel ffmpeg-devel libopenmpt-devel clang clang-devel
cargo install cargo-generate-rpm
cargo build --release
strip target/release/rusttracker
cargo generate-rpm

For DEB (Ubuntu/Debian):

sudo apt-get install -y gcc g++ binutils pkg-config libasound2-dev libwayland-dev libx11-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev libudev-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libavdevice-dev libavfilter-dev libopenmpt-dev clang libclang-dev
cargo install cargo-deb
cargo build --release
strip target/release/rusttracker
cargo deb

Built With (The Shoulders of Giants)

• wgpu & egui - Hardware-accelerated UI that makes things pretty
• cpal - Cross-platform Audio I/O that makes things loud
• spectrum-analyzer - Fast Fourier Transforms that make the pretty things react to the loud things
• crossbeam-channel - Lock-free concurrency because threads should get along
• openmpt - Tracker module decoding for that sweet, sweet nostalgia

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3).