Rustortion

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A guitar and bass amp simulator built in Rust. Runs standalone with JACK, or as a VST3/CLAP plugin in your DAW.

Screenshot

Features

• Low-latency audio processing with configurable oversampling (1x–16x)
• 12 DSP stages: preamp (with 12AX7 triode clipper), compressor, tone stack, power amp, noise gate, level, multi-band saturator, delay, reverb, tremolo, 16-band graphic EQ, and NAM (Neural Amp Modeler) model loading (WaveNet + LSTM .nam files)
• Per-stage bypass and stage reordering within the chain
• Impulse response cabinet simulation for both guitar and bass
• Saving and loading presets with keyboard hotkey switching
• Real-time recording capability
• Built-in tuner
• FFT-based pitch shifting for alternate tunings without retuning your instrument
• MIDI controller support
• VST3 and CLAP plugin builds for DAW use — see Plugin
• Tabbed GUI with minimap, collapsible stage cards, and input filter controls - built with Iced
• English and Simplified Chinese UI

Requirements

• Linux with PipeWire (JACK support enabled)
• Rust toolchain: Install Rust

[!NOTE] This has been tested on a Raspberry Pi 4 and reasonably high end desktop PC. Your mileage may vary on other hardware.

Running

Pre-built Binary

You can download a tarball of a pre-built binary from the releases page.

sudo apt-get install libjack-jackd2-0
tar -xf rustortion-standalone-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz
cd rustortion-standalone-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
./rustortion

Running/Building from Source

With the rust toolchain installed, you can clone the repository and run the application:

sudo apt-get install libjack-jackd2-dev libasound2-dev pkg-config
cargo run --release

[!TIP] On some Linux machines with PipeWire, you may need to run JACK explicitly:

sudo apt-get install pipewire-jack
pw-jack cargo run --release

VST3/CLAP Plugin

Rustortion also ships as an audio plugin in two formats: CLAP (Rustortion.clap) and VST3 (Rustortion.vst3). Both are built from the same code and expose the same GUI as the standalone app.

Bundles are published for three targets:

[!NOTE] The aarch64 and Windows bundles are built natively in CI on every release, but have not been loaded in a DAW by hand. They should work; if one doesn't, please open an issue. There is no macOS build — it needs an Apple Developer ID for signing and notarization, without which a DAW will refuse to load the plugin.

Download the archive for your platform from the releases page and unpack both bundles into your plugin folders:

On Linux (substitute aarch64 for x86_64 on a Pi):

sudo apt-get install libjack-jackd2-0
unzip Rustortion-linux-x86_64.zip
mkdir -p ~/.clap ~/.vst3
cp -r Rustortion.clap ~/.clap/
cp -r Rustortion.vst3 ~/.vst3/

~/.clap and ~/.vst3 are the standard per-user plugin directories on Linux; most hosts scan them by default.

On Windows, unzip Rustortion-windows-x86_64.zip and copy Rustortion.clap into %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\CLAP and Rustortion.vst3 into %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\VST3 (typically C:\Program Files\Common Files\).

Rescan plugins in your DAW afterwards.

To build the plugin from source instead:

make plugin           # builds target/bundled/Rustortion.{clap,vst3}
make plugin-install   # copies them into ~/.clap and ~/.vst3

Contributing

This is an experimental project. Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.

License

This project is provided under the MIT License. Rustortion is under active development and should be used at your own risk.

Impulse Responses

Science Amplification

This project includes impulse responses used with permission from Science Amplification.

Other

This project also includes freely licensed impulse responses from freesound.org:

• Multiple Cabinets – Jesterdyne
• Bristol Mix – Mansardian
• Brown Cab – Tosha73