// the find
sonosaurus/sonobus
Source code for SonoBus, a real-time network audio streaming collaboration tool.
SonoBus is a peer-to-peer low-latency audio streaming app for real-time music collaboration, podcasting, and remote sessions. It runs as a standalone app on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Linux, and as an AU/VST plugin inside a DAW. The target user is a musician or podcaster who needs something that actually works over the internet without a paid intermediary service.
Per-peer latency and quality control is genuinely useful — you can give the drummer a tighter buffer and the vocalist a looser one without affecting everyone. Opus codec support at variable bitrates means you can trade off quality vs. stability mid-session rather than committing up front. Plugin format support (AU, VST) is the right call — musicians live in their DAW and a standalone-only tool would get dropped immediately. The AOO (Audio over OSC) transport layer is purpose-built for this use case rather than being a repurposed video conferencing stack.
No encryption on the audio data — the README says this explicitly and matter-of-factly, which is honest, but it's a real problem for anything sensitive. The JUCE fork and AOO library are vendored as git-subrepos pointing to personal GitHub forks, so you're one abandoned fork away from a broken build and there's no clear upgrade path. Building on Windows requires Cygwin just to run shell scripts, which is unnecessary friction when CMake already handles the cross-platform build. The iOS app exists but the build process for it isn't documented in the repo at all — you're on your own there.