Jackson Shuey
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○ ongoingMar 2026Sound

Tentacl

Distributed, local-first mix intelligence: per-channel feature extractors stream to an engine that suggests bounded moves toward a reference.

StackC++20 · JUCE · Tauri · PyTorch · ONNX · ProtobufLinksgithub

What it is

Mixing engineers carry reference tracks in their heads; Tentacl makes that explicit and local. Lightweight VST3/AU plugins sit on each channel and stream features — level, spectral balance, dynamics — to a C++ mix engine that compares your mix against a reference and returns bounded, conservative processing suggestions to a Tauri desktop app. Nothing leaves your machine.

Architecture

A monorepo: C++20 channel extractors and the comparison engine, Protobuf schemas on the wire, a Tauri + React control surface, and a PyTorch role-classifier exported to ONNX that labels each channel (kick, vocal, pad) so suggestions are role-aware. The hard constraints — real-time safety in the audio thread, bounded suggestions that can't wreck a mix — drove the whole design.