ELK OS Promises To Make New Types Of Musical Instruments Possible

At Superbooth 2019, Mind Music Labs gave us an in-depth look at their ELK Music OS and some of their prototype synth modules.

ELK OS is an operating system platform for musical instruments that is designed to streamline the development of custom audio hardware. It also is designed to make it easy to turn VSTs and Rack Extensions into high-performing audio devices.

We talked with the company’s Matt Ward, who showed us prototypes of standalone and Eurorack synthesizers based on ELK, and explained the advantages that the OS offers.

8 thoughts on “ELK OS Promises To Make New Types Of Musical Instruments Possible

  1. ELK seems to be more of an application framework built into a LINUX distribution than a new “OS”, but the possibilities of this are really limitless. I can see that in 10 years we’re all going to have wonderful stand-alone synthesizers that can morph their sound engines much like an Aira Plug-Out does. Wearing my oracle hat — It won’t be ELK or Roland though, it’ll be hardware manufacturers supporting open source functionality. It’ll be how companies make notebook computers today, but they’ll be synthesizer interfaces.

  2. According to their website, ELK *is* a Linux distro. It’s optimized for real-time processing. Their demo box is just a controller. They are using Yocto and Xenomai Cobalt kernel.

  3. This has immense potential. I have always fantasized my favorite VSTs as stand alone hardware, I guess almost everyone has…

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