System Requirements

LibreTracks is a lightweight native app (Rust + Tauri) rather than a heavyweight studio DAW, so it runs comfortably on modest machines. The numbers below are practical guidance, not hard limits — the real bottleneck on stage is real‑time pitch/warp, which scales with how many tracks you shift at once.

Operating Systems

Platform	Minimum	Notes
Windows	Windows 10 (64‑bit)	Needs the WebView2 runtime, which is preinstalled on current Windows 10/11.
macOS	macOS 10.15 Catalina	Intel and Apple Silicon. Keep the system up to date — the in‑app UI uses the system WebView, and an old WebKit can render parts of the interface incorrectly.
Linux	Ubuntu 22.04 / Fedora 36 or newer	Requires webkit2gtk-4.1, gtk3 and ALSA. Provided as .deb, .rpm and .AppImage.

Why macOS 10.15+? The desktop UI runs inside the operating system’s WebView. LibreTracks ships CSS down‑levelled for the WebKit in Catalina’s Safari 13, and the audio engine bundles its own FFmpeg/codec libraries inside the app, so it launches without any system‑wide dependencies. Older macOS releases ship a WebKit too old to render the interface and miss symbols the app needs at launch.

Audio Formats

The audio engine bundles FFmpeg on all three platforms, so the same formats load everywhere — WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, and AAC/M4A among them. There is no separate codec install: on macOS the codec libraries travel inside the .app, and on Windows and Linux they ship alongside the app.

Hardware

	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	Modern 64‑bit dual‑core	Quad‑core or better — needed for several pitch/warp tracks at once
RAM	4 GB	8 GB+
Storage	SSD with room for your sessions and audio	SSD; sessions keep audio + peak caches alongside the project
Display	1280×800	1440×900 or larger

Real‑time pitch and warp are the heaviest part of the app. A single shifted track is light; running many shifted tracks simultaneously is what benefits from a faster CPU. On a typical modern quad‑core you can keep nine or more concurrent pitch‑shifted voices within the audio budget.

Live Audio Setup

For rehearsal you can use the built‑in output, but for stage use a dedicated audio interface is strongly recommended:

• Windows — an ASIO driver gives the lowest, most stable latency and exposes every hardware channel (two for a stereo interface, eight for a MOTU, thirty‑two for an X32 over USB).
• macOS — Core Audio with a class‑compliant or vendor interface.
• Buffer size — lower buffers reduce latency but cost CPU. Find the smallest buffer that runs without dropouts on your machine.

Real‑time pitch shifting adds inherent latency (roughly ~108 ms with the shipping engine), so when timing is critical, prefer pre‑warped/pre‑shifted material over live shifting where you can.

See Audio Routing & Metronome for how to enable physical outputs and the Apply/Discard channel flow.