Nama - digital audio workstation

August 4, 2026 · View on GitHub

Description

Nama is a digital audio workstation. It is suitable for multitrack recording, effects-processing, editing, mixing, and other audio tasks. Nama uses Ecasound, developed by Kai Vehmanen, for audio processing. Nama hosts LADSPA and LV2 plugins, Ecasound effects and controllers. It works well under JACK and ALSA.

New projects begin with a mixer, and may include tracks (multiple takes), buses, effects, sends, inserts, marks, regions, fades, edits, sequences and submixes, with mixdown to wav, ogg, mp3, etc.

Nama has a full-featured command interpreter with TAB completion, keyword help and command history; a hotkey mode for tweaking effect parameters, and project management (history, branching, tags) based on git. Users can define command aliases, custom commands, and key bindings for the hotkey mode.

The help system provides searchable access to documentation for all Nama commands and shortcuts, and for LADSPA, LV2 and Ecasound effects. In addition to executing its own commands, Nama will pass commands to Ecasound, Midish, the perl interpreter and the shell.

Nama has several templating options for project reuse: Effect chains are presets for one or more effects. Effect profiles (used to create Nama's mastering network) are templates for placing effects on multiple tracks. User scripting provides another way to reuse functionality.

Project state is serialized as JSON files and the entire project history is managed by Git. Projects can be branched, tagged, and easily restored to earlier states.

Installation

Installing Nama and its Perl Dependencies from CPAN

The following command will install Nama, automatically pulling in all Perl modules required to run Nama in text mode:

	cpanm Audio::Nama

However if you don't have cpanm, this should still work:

	PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT=1 cpan Audio::Nama

To use the GUI, you will need to install Tk:

	cpanm Tk

You can browse the sources or download a tarball via:

	http://search.cpan.org/dist/Audio-Nama

Building from Source

If you want to inspect or modify Nama's internals, or keep up with new developments, you can pull the source code as follows:

	git clone git://gitlab.com/bolangi/nama.git

Consult the BUILD.md file for build instructions.

Non-Perl Dependencies

The Ecasound audio processing libraries should be installed. Ecasound should be compiled with support for LADSPA, libsndfile, libsamplerate and JACK. Ecasound may be obtained from http://ecasound.seul.org/ecasound/ or as precompiled binary package for your Un*x distribution.

The LADSPA SDK is required to autosense LADSPA plugins and scaling hints. It is available at:

http://www.ladspa.org/ladspa_sdk/download.html

In particular the utility program 'analyseplugin' must be installed in a directory in your execution PATH.

Nama's mastering mode uses a number of LADSPA plugins in a reasonably flat starting configuration. provided that the user installs the plugins listed in the default configuration file .namarc.

Git is required to utilize Nama's project management and and undo features.

Copyright

All rights are reserved except as provided by the Gnu Public License, version 3, as detailed in the file COPYING provided with this distribution.