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Architecture
SoundCraft is a Cargo workspace of small crates with enforced layering (cargo xtask layers).
Nothing below the UI knows about egui, so the interface can be replaced.
The UI package pins craft-ui for common icon-button and track record-enable interactions.
SoundCraft supplies each state's colors, border, radius and icon painter; selection and command
dispatch remain in the toolbar and track controls. The single-shape frame option preserves the
existing fill/border blending when controls are disabled. Specialized transport Play/Stop/Record styling,
nonlinear meters, faders, pan gestures, fonts and the live theme resolver remain local. Shared adapters read the current palette. The UI
requires Rust 1.95 or later without raising the core workspace's Rust 1.90 declaration.
L0 time audio-io midi (standalone: no workspace deps)
L1 dsp clap-host (plugins; clap-host is the only unsafe crate)
L2 model (the session document)
L3 mix (the mix engine)
L4 engine playback (commands, undo, I/O · audio devices)
L5 automation (MCP server, control-channel client)
L6 ui-egui (the user interface)
apps: soundcraft (desktop) · soundcraft-cli · soundcraft-web (wasm)
The document
soundcraft_model::Session is plain data (serde): tracks with playlists of clips, mixer state
(inserts, sends, routing, automation lanes), tempo and meter maps, memory locations, groups,
busses, and EditState (selection, tools, modes, view flags). Decoded audio lives in a
SourcePool of Arcs that is not serialised; cloning a session is cheap. Sessions save as
.scraft JSON plus an Audio Files/ folder.
Commands and undo
Every user action is a CommandSpec (id, label, menu path, shortcut, params doc, enabled, run)
registered in crates/engine/src/cmd/. Engine::execute(id, params) runs it, catches any escaped
panic, and pushes an undo snapshot (the previous Arc<Session>) when the document changed.
Continuous gestures use execute_merged so a fader drag is one undo step. Menus are built from
the incumbent's menu catalog (crates/engine/catalog/menus.txt); a menu item lights up when a
command has the same menu path and label (or an alias maps it), which also drives the parity
report.
Audio
soundcraft_mix::MixEngine::render(session, pos, frames, out) renders one block: clips (gain,
fades, clip effects) → trim → inserts → pre-fader sends → fader/mute (automation, VCA, trim
automation) → post-fader sends → pan → busses → aux inputs → master faders. Independent strips
process in parallel; plugin delay compensation aligns every path. The same engine renders
bounces offline (render_range) and realtime playback (soundcraft_playback::Player, which owns
it on the audio thread and receives new session snapshots through a channel).
The cpal callbacks mark their thread (soundcraft_playback::mark_audio_thread). Code that may run
there can ask on_audio_thread() before doing anything that blocks; the desktop app's logger does,
so a log:: record from the audio thread (a stream error, a full synth event queue, a hosted
plugin's failed process, a CLAP plugin's own log call) is kept without waiting and written later
by the UI thread (see README › Logs).
Agent control
The desktop app's control channel (JSON lines over TCP) exposes engine commands, inspection,
synthetic input and screenshots; soundcraft-cli mcp wraps either a headless engine or a running
app as an MCP server. See control-protocol.md and mcp.md.