Documentation

Nebula Sound System is a digital audio workstation: a modular synthesizer and a step sequencer around a track-based timeline, with its own instruments, its own effects and a local Control API. These pages are the project's own documents, published from the repository's docs/ folder so they can be read without cloning anything.

Document	What it answers
User manual	How to install it, play it, arrange, mix and export a song. 21 chapters.
Developer manual	How the code is organised, the five architectural rules, building, testing, packaging, and what is knowingly missing.
Features and current status	The consolidated inventory: shipped, partial, planned, deliberately dropped — every row names the file that proves it.
Architecture and decisions	The decision records: what was decided, what was rejected, and why.

The docs and the downloads

The builds are on the project page: Nebula Sound System. Six files are published there, all 0.3.0-alpha.278 (3 November 2026). Each one is a real build of that release; the page shows its size and its SHA-256 next to it.

Platform	File	Size	What it is
Windows	Nebula-0.3.0-alpha.278-setup.exe	18.9 MB	Installer. A per-user install, no administrator prompt.
Windows	Nebula-0.3.0-alpha.278-windows-x64.zip	24.7 MB	Portable. Unpack it anywhere and run nebula.exe.
Linux	Nebula-0.3.0-alpha.278-linux-x64.deb	34.8 MB	Installer for Debian, Ubuntu and their children. Installs to /opt/nebula and adds a nebula command.
Linux	Nebula-0.3.0-alpha.278-linux-x86_64.rpm	31.3 MB	Installer for Fedora, RHEL and openSUSE.
Linux	Nebula-0.3.0-alpha.278-linux-x86_64.AppImage	43.7 MB	No install at all: make it executable and run it.
Linux	Nebula-0.3.0-alpha.278-linux-x64.tar.gz	47.7 MB	Portable. Unpack it anywhere and run ./nebula.sh.

§1. Install and start walks through each of them, and §19. Troubleshooting covers what to do when one of them will not start.

The release notes are for the same version as these files: 0.3.0-alpha.278 — CLAP plug-in hosting, the whole MIDI hardware phase and the multi-core live mixer.

The user manual was written against 0.3.0-alpha.272, the build before this one. Its pictures are real screenshots of that build, refreshed on 3 November 2026, and the installation chapter writes the file names as Nebula-<version>-... throughout, so it still describes these files; where a chapter has fallen behind it says so in a dated note (see §18).

macOS has a build script and no build: there is no Mac in this project's toolchain, so treat macOS as unverified — the developer manual's setup chapter says the same.

Nebula is alpha software. It can write, arrange, mix and export real music today — the songs and pictures in the manual were made in it — but it is under active change and a few things are knowingly missing. §18. What is not there yet lists them, including the ones that will not change: VST3 is not supported and cannot be, and a hosted plug-in's own editor window is never shown.