"Someone open-sourced Logic Pro": a DAW one person built in 18 days with Claude Code. Why did 3,000 people download it and only 181 stars?

ProWave is an open-source music production app built by a Portuguese indie dev as a clone of Apple's Logic Pro. It runs on Windows and Linux. On Oct 30, five music production YouTubers covered it on the same day, for about 110k views combined. The installers were downloaded around 3,000 times, but the GitHub repo has only 181 stars. The gap it hit is worth understanding, but if you're after stars, this path is narrower than it looks.

The Oct 30 morning video

In 2026 Oct 30, the music production channel Busy Works Beats posted a video titled "Someone Open Sourced Logic Pro!" The description was two lines: "Pro Wave (Open-Source Rust Project on Remade.wiki)" followed by a GitHub link. A week later, the video had 39,153 views and 174 comments (YouTube, 11-06).

The most-liked comment: "What I love about those tools is that they can run on Linux natively." Another wrote, "I'm tired of swapping between my mac and my PC. I'm DL'n this as soon as i get off work!" Someone else: "*the first legal logic pro on windows ever guys*". The author also showed up in the comments: "I'll release a huge update soon for Pro Wave."

Same day, Bolo Da Producer posted "They Cloned Logic Pro!?" (44,706 views), Greg Kocis posted "Logic Pro For Windows & Linux?" (about 13k, with a blog post to go with it), Soniq Sounds posted one with 4,422 views, and Busy Works Beats followed up with "Audio Companies are in TROUBLE Now" (8,947). Before that, the repo had been up for 11 days with 22 stars total.

What it is

In one line: a DAW (digital audio workstation) that looks like Logic Pro and works like it too, written in pure Rust, with the UI drawn in egui, no Electron, no JUCE. The author is Fábio Soares (fabox-os on GitHub, from Porto, 27 followers). The repo was created Oct 19. Of 103 commits, 3 are directly credited to claude, and the repo includes an AGENTS.md written for AI agents.

What works now: tracks, MIDI and audio clips, recording, a piano roll, a mixer with effects and automation, a built-in synth, and guitar amp modeling. The README reports its own progress: 176 menu items done, 73 of them (41%), and 24 of 77 roadmap items done. Opening Logic's project files, .logicx, doesn't work yet; the repo only has a format note.

The part that got real effort is distribution: every version tag automatically builds the full set of installers for Windows, macOS, .deb, .rpm, AppImage, and Flatpak. The first thing on the README is a screenshot that's nearly indistinguishable from Logic. A YouTuber who can't code can download it, double-click, and start recording a video.

Why this one, and why these days

A wave of "AI clones commercial software" is hot. In October, the reverse-engineering repo REA went viral, and Low Level's "I Tested The Viral Reverse Engineering Repo" hit 3.64M views. That same month, the storytold org under ArtCraft released WordCraft (a Word clone, 17.4k stars), CADCraft, GridCraft, and SoundCraft (a Pro Tools clone, 4.1k stars). Music YouTubers chased the topic for weeks: "Open Source Pro Tools Just Got an Update!" (10-1.57M) and "FL Studio is now Open Source!" (10-2.67M).

The Logic slot was still open. Someone had cloned Pro Tools, someone had cloned FL Studio (LYNX SHARE, honeydew), but nobody had done Logic. ProWave filled that gap, and the same channels picked it up for their next video. The same author used the same approach (Claude Code + Rust/egui) to clone DaVinci Resolve as the Picasso Suite, which has only 37 stars and no big channel covering it. The difference is who you clone and when.

The title sells itself. Logic only runs on Mac, and "Logic for Windows" is something musicians have wished for for years. One commenter said, "It was on Windows before! When Emagic owned Logic! I ran it in Windows XP." Around Oct 27, Logic Pro 13 had just updated, and Logic users were already watching related videos that week. (Whether there's a causal link is unverified.)

Where users come from

The chain is clear: it got listed in a directory first, YouTubers hunting for clone topics then picked it from the directory for their next video, and forums and X spread it further. Busy Works Beats named Remade.wiki directly in the video description, which suggests he found it by browsing the directory himself rather than the author pitching him (inference). The author's own YouTube channel has almost no views, it doesn't show up on HN, and no tech outlet has written about it.

Star count over time went 10-30 22 → 10-31 56 → 11-02 95 → 11-04 123 → 11-06 181 (GitHub daily star counts). Release package downloads total about 3,000, and v0.2.1 alone accounts for 1,700 (GitHub Releases, 11-06). Downloads are more than ten times the stars. The people coming in were musicians who wanted to install it and try it, not developers who would casually star a repo.

The criticism

The VI-Control thread ran two pages of argument. One person said: "Whilst decompiled/recompiled cloned software is technically not the same as pirated software, it is just as unethical." Another replied: "Every time I see a new vibe coded… DAW I feel the need to remind people that Reaper exists." The original poster tested it on Linux and concluded, "It opens but that's about it." Another put it more bluntly: "This will not be another Logic… It feels more like a proof-of-concept thing."

The Issues tab has both kinds of voices too: one says "NOT RECORDING AND NOTHING WORKS," another says "Bravo 👏🏼," and others ask for Apple Loops, an open-source Alchemy, or a mobile version. A YouTube comment warned: "the frontier AI's are being instructed to not clone commercial applications." On Logic Pro Help, someone worried Apple might raise trademark issues. The README includes a disclaimer (no Apple code, images, or sounds included), but the project's topics still include logic-pro-workflow.

Who it's competing with

ProWave is the only one built to mimic Logic, and it's the only one on GitHub right now. But the broad category of "AI-cloned commercial DAWs" is already crowded. The ones reaching thousands of stars are organized series, not solo projects.

If it were you

Verdict: Copy its distribution chain, but don't expect stars from it. Pick a clone target that's still open, ship installers for every platform, and get into directories so YouTubers come to you. That path works, but what it brings is downloads, not stars. ProWave hit nearly all of these, and even so it got only 181 stars in 18 days.

Who it suits: Developers already inside a creator community (music, video editing, design, 3D) who can use tools like Claude Code to put together a version that looks right and installs in two or three weeks, and who care more about building a reputation, Discord, and users in that community than about GitHub numbers.

Who it doesn't suit: Anyone who only wants stars, anyone scared of cease-and-desist letters or of being called "just piracy," and anyone who thinks a month will get them usable professional software. The forum consensus is that "none of them are ready for real work yet."

How to do it: Start with a table: which professional apps exist on only one platform, have lots of users, and aren't cheap, and which of those have already been cloned. Apple's pro apps beyond Final Cut Pro and Logic, and Windows-only tools that could come to Mac or Linux, are all worth checking. Pick one that's still open, and don't use the trademark as the name (ProWave didn't call itself Logic). Make the README state clearly that it contains no original code or assets. Ship installers for all platforms on day one, and put a screenshot and a progress table on the first screen. If you want stars, add something developers care about: reading the original project files, plugin formats, or a reusable Rust audio/UI component others can build on. That's what gets developers to star a repo.

How to get users: Submit to remade.wiki, AlternativeTo, AppImage Hub, and Flathub first. Then find the YouTubers already running "XX got open-sourced" series and send them the link directly, since they're always short on the next topic. For developer stars, write a separate technical post for Show HN and r/rust that covers the architecture, not "who we cloned."

Timing: Within the next month or two, while the clone wave is still hot (estimate). YouTubers chase novelty, and once there are five or six similar clones, viewers get tired of it. Comment sections already show it: "All of this extra cloning of DAWs is exhausting."

Signs you've misjudged it: ① ProWave gained more than 2,000 stars organically within a month, which would mean the musician community can drive stars, and it's worth pushing harder. ② Apple or another vendor sends a takedown notice and GitHub removes these repos, which would mean the window has closed. ③ The next "XX got open-sourced" video drops below ten thousand views, which would mean the topic is cooling and the approach needs to change.

Data & sources: GitHub repo page, README, Issues and Releases download counts (11-06); GitHub daily star counts (10-30 to 11-06); YouTube video pages and comments (Busy Works Beats, Bolo Da Producer, Greg Kocis, Soniq Sounds, Mr. Mig x MaxxBeats, 11-06); remade.wiki listing; VI-Control thread "Pro-Wave - DAW clone with Logic workflow" and Logic Pro Help thread "They cloned Logic for Windows and Linux !"; X @dextune (11-04); GitHub pages for SoundCraft, LYNX SHARE, LMMS, Ardour, etc.