tono in ten minutes

From nothing to a sound you built, heard, and changed on purpose — five steps. All you need is a Rust toolchain (rustup.rs).

1. Install the CLI

cargo install tono
tono --version   # tono 1.10.0

2. Render your first sound

A sound in tono is a SoundDoc — a small JSON file describing a synthesis graph. Save this as blip.json:

{ "name": "blip", "duration": 0.3, "engine": 5,
  "root": { "type": "mul", "inputs": [
    { "type": "sine", "freq": 880 },
    { "type": "env", "a": 0.002, "d": 0.08, "s": 0.0, "r": 0.05 } ] } }

tono render blip.json -o out/

"engine": 5 pins the current DSP kernels: the render is byte-identical on any machine.

3. See it, then hear it

out/ holds four files:

File	What it shows
blip.wav	the audio
blip.png	the spectrogram (frequency over time) — look at it first
blip_wave.png	the waveform (loudness over time) — look at it second
blip.stats.json	the numbers: peak, loudness, brightness, attack/decay

Author by looking, not guessing. To hear it through the speakers, add the playback feature:

cargo install tono --features play
tono play blip.json

4. Change one thing, measure it

Copy blip.json to blip2.json, change "freq": 880 to "freq": 220 in the copy, and ask what that did:

tono diff blip.json blip2.json

• The centroid_hz row shows the brightness drop (881 → 221 Hz here).
• The bottom line is the sample-domain distance; identical docs answer "sample-identical".

That is the loop: edit → diff → judge. Run it at full speed — every save re-renders the images and stats (Ctrl-C to stop):

tono render blip.json -o out/ --watch

5. Pick your next step

I want to…	Go to
Make sounds (SFX, UI, impacts)	Design sound effects — recipes and how to judge a sound by its stats, plus the full node vocabulary
Make music	Compose songs — the seq chapter, then the song layer: patterns, tracks, arrangements (docs.rs)
Use it from Python	the Python guide — the typed Song/Pattern/Program API; an equivalent song compiles to the same hash from Python or Rust
Put it in a game	Run live & embedded — the live Engine/Mixer runtime and parametric patches (zero-asset SFX at runtime)
Write no code	the desktop pattern station (build it) or the playground examples (cargo run -p tono-play --example live_band)