Elk Audio OS documentation#

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Elk Audio OS is a fully-featured embedded Linux distribution optimized for low-latency audio applications. It is currently used by companies making professional audio products, audio enthusiasts building their own devices, and serves as the core of Elk’s own Elk Live online music collaboration tool.

The core audio plugin host, Sushi, is also available as an independent application for macOS and Linux, and can be used as a flexible programming environment for building other kind of audio applications for those platforms.

Since the release of Elk Audio OS 1.0, we are focusing on giving open support only for Sushi and for the image running on Raspberry Pi 4 with HiFiBerry and the RPi audio hats. The previous documentation on other development kits and features (e.g. the Elk Pi board) is now available under the “Legacy Documentation” section in this page.

About Elk Audio OS

Do you want to find out more about Elk Audio OS? Check out why it could be useful for you, and what are the supported hardware platforms and the licensing options for both open-source and commercial applications.

Getting Started on your computer

You only need a macOS or Linux computer to try out Elk’s most important part, its audio engine Sushi, and get an idea of how making products for Elk feels like.

Getting Started on Raspberry Pi 4

If you want to try out the low-latency performance of Elk on embedded hardware, the easiest is to start with one of the prebuilt images that we provide for the Raspberry Pi 4 Single board computers.

Sushi reference

Want to dig more into Sushi’s processing capabilities and how to control them? Check out the detailed reference on Elk’s audio engine.