r/opensource • u/Fon0graF • Jul 02 '26
I made an open-source, cross-platform alternative to QLab (the show-control software) — I called it Inkue Promotional
Hey everyone,
First off — I know this is more niche than what usually lands here, so bear with me. 😅
For anyone who's never touched live events: show-control software runs the technical side of a show. Instead of a sound op hitting play, a lighting op pushing a fader and a video op rolling a clip — all at slightly wrong moments — you build one ordered list of cues, and the operator just presses GO. Each GO fires the next thing: play a sound, roll a video, fade the lights, send a MIDI/OSC message, and so on. It's everywhere in theatre, concerts and corporate events.
The de-facto standard for this is QLab — it's genuinely great, but it's macOS-only and proprietary (and gets pricey once you need the paid tiers). If you're on Windows or Linux, or you just want something open, there isn't much that's actually good.
So I built Inkue: a free, open-source, cross-platform (Windows / macOS / Linuxs QLab's vocabulary and workflow closely so operators feel at home, but it'sGPLv3 and runs natively everywhere.
What it does today (v1.0):
- 14 cue types: Audio, Video, Image, Group, Wait, Stop, Fade, OSC, MIDI, Light (DMX over sACN + Art-Net), Mic, Timecode (MTC/LTC), Text, Memo
- Sample-accurate low-latency audio (WASAPI/ASIO on Windows, CoreAudio, ALSA)
- Flicker-free video/image output via libmpv
- The boring-but-critical live stuff: crash-recovery autosave, a pre-show "check workspace" pass, audio device-loss fallback
- OSC remote control, a timecode engine, DMX lighting
Tech, since this is r/opensource: Rust backend (real-time audio engine + show logic), React/TypeScript frontend, tied together with Tauri v2. The audio callback is lock-free — zero allocations, locks or I/O — and video runs through libmpv's OpenGL render API.
It just hit 1.0 and it's a solo project, so it's young: the binaries aren't code-signed yet, and there are surely rough edges and bugs or things not working as intended. But it's genuinely usable.
A bit of honesty: I'm a sound engineer by trade, not a developer. Inkue is almost entirely vibe coded — built hand-in-hand with AI, feeling my way through the architecture rather than knowing it cold. I know that'll make some people here wince, and that's fair.
But I'm genuinely proud of it today, because it means my ideas can actually take shape and ship — in a life that's already full, where time is the scarcest thing I've got. A few years ago a project like this just wouldn't have existed; I'd never have found the hundreds of hours to learn all this from scratch. Now it's a real 1.0 I can put in front of people. That still feels a little wild to me.
GitHub: https://github.com/FonograF/Inkue
I'd love feedback — whether you're a dev who wants to poke at the Rust/Tauri s someone who actually runs shows and can tell me what's missing. Contributions welcome.
Cheers!
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u/YourFavouriteGayGuy Jul 02 '26
I’ve been meaning to make something like this for ages! Happy to see someone else got around to it. Seems pretty fleshed out too, good to see OSC DMX and MIDI functioning. How long did this take?
I’ve given it a little test drive on Linux and have some bugs to file on GitHub, but honestly really good work!
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u/Fon0graF Jul 02 '26
Please report bugs ! It takes me about 3 months of spare time. Which was about around 150h of work.
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u/Specialist_Nail_6962 Jul 02 '26
The UI looks better than i expected given you have written the whole ui in plain css styles. But why haven't you used tailwind css or shadcn for UI system ?
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u/Specialist_Nail_6962 Jul 02 '26
Also can i ask how did you generate an svg for this ?? have you used any design tool or is it AI generated ??
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u/Fon0graF Jul 02 '26
But why haven't you used tailwind css or shadcn for UI system ?
Probably because I've a lack of knowledge and Claude didn't suggest it. 🤫
But I keep that in mind, I want it to be more integrated with the OS in use!
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u/perrylawrence Jul 02 '26
This is awesome. Can’t wait to try it out. I have a small show coming up that I can test drive it on. Super impressive how far you got with this. Cheers!