Quick start
How Maru fits together
Understand the connections between plugins, sounds, Studio, the Engine and your account.
Maru connects three activities: making music with existing tools, creating tools and content of your own, and delivering that work to other people. You can start at any of them.
Play, create and distribute
| Your goal | Starting point | What you work with |
|---|---|---|
| Make music | Plugins and Sounds | Instruments, effects, samples and musical content |
| Turn recordings into an instrument | Samplers | Recordings, note or pad mappings and saved settings |
| Make an instrument or effect | Create with an agent in Studio | Your musical idea, its sound and its controls |
| Combine musical tools | Racks and patches | Modules, connections and their saved configuration |
| Add new sounds on demand | Generation | Requests, jobs and results you choose to keep |
| Reach listeners and customers | Publishing and exports | A playable page, content files or a supported plugin release |
Use Studio to edit an instrument, effect or bank with an agent. Use a host, such as a browser player or DAW, to play it. The Engine is the technology behind building and running Maru tools; you do not need to learn it to use a product.
The same idea can have several forms
A percussion idea might become a sample pack, a playable bank, a drum instrument or a rack containing an instrument and effects. These forms carry different information. An audio recording preserves the sound; a project preserves editable behavior; a release prepares that behavior for a supported destination.
Choose the form your audience needs. One working browser version does not mean every installed or hardware destination is ready.
Your account and your work
Your account connects hosted projects, your library, permissions and purchases. Local project folders and exported files have their own storage. Projects, library and saved work explains what to keep and where to look.
Your public profile and community connections help other people discover your work and help you return to creators you follow. You can build on an existing idea by remixing a module in Studio.
Build on the platform
Creators can develop connected products, while partners can bring parts of Maru into other applications. Follow apps and integrations for those paths and beta and early access for how to evaluate developing capabilities.