Nendo Platform

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Nendo is an open source platform for AI-driven audio management, intelligence, and generation. It is a feature-rich web application stack to develop and run tools that are based on Nendo Core and it's plugin ecosystem.

Requirements - Quickstart - Server Deployment - Development - Troubleshooting

Requirements

To run Nendo Platform on Unix-based systems, make sure you have docker and docker-compose (>=1.28.0) installed. Make sure the user with which you intend to run Nendo Platform is a member of the docker group, otherwise the make commands will fail with permission denied.

GPU Compatibility

Note: If your system does not have a GPU available, you can still run Nendo Platform in CPU mode but expect certain tools to fail.

Minimum Requirements

Nendo Platform needs a GPU with 8 GB of VRAM for the most basic AI features to work properly. Expect certain tools to be significantly slower or even to fail when running with the minimum requirements.

Also note that audio files over 15 minutes in length might not be processable with the minimum requirements.

Recommended Requirements

Nendo Platform needs a GPU with at least 24 GB of VRAM for its whole feature set to work properly. The list of supported hardware includes, but is not limited to: RTX 3090 (Ti), RTX 4090 (Ti), RTX 8000, RTX A5000, RTX A6000, Tesla V100, A10, A100, H100.

The default images for the GPU-enabled tools in Nendo use the nvcr.io/nvidia/pytorch:22.08-py3 image which is based on CUDA 11.7.1 and requires NVIDIA Driver release 515. Depending on your hardware setup, it might be necessary to build Nendo's tools with another nvidia container toolkit image as base. Refer to the nvidia frameworks support matrix to find the right base image and tag for your hardware and make sure to use a version that includes pytorch. Then, replace the image and tag at the top of build/core/3.8-gpu/Dockerfile with the one that fits your system and call make build-tools-gpu.

Quickstart

Everything can be controlled using make. To get an overview of the available commands, just call it directly:

make

Before you start Nendo for the first time, you have to build the images:

make setup

Then you can start Nendo Platform by simply calling:

make run

Now start your browser and navigate to http://localhost to view the Nendo Platform.

The default username / password combination for the dev superuser is:

Username: dev@okio.ai

Password: AIaudio4all!

To change the password of the default user, refer to the server deployment section.

CPU mode

If your machine does not have a GPU, you can run Nendo Platform in CPU-only mode.

First, build the CPU-mode images:

make setup-cpu

Then start Nendo by calling:

make run-cpu

Note: Many of the AI capabilities of a Nendo Platform require a GPU to run properly or at all. Expect most tools to fail in CPU-only mode.

Server deployment

To deploy Nendo Platform to your server, you need to set a few configuration variables before starting the server.

First, you should decide whether or not you'd like to have SSL enabled. Running Nendo Platform on a server without SSL enabled is strongly discouraged for security reasons. The default is to have SSL enabled so you need to configure the correct location of your SSL certificate and private key:

export SSL_CERTIFICATE_PATH=/path/to/my/certificate.crt
export SSL_KEY_PATH=/path/to/my/key.key

Alternatively, you can create the local directory ./cert and add your certificate and key as ./conf/nginx/certs/nendo.crt and ./conf/nginx/certs/nendo.key and it will be picked up without the need to specify the above environment variables.

If you want to run Nendo Platform on your server without SSL enabled, you can skip defining the above environment variables and instead just set USE_SSL to false:

export USE_SSL=false

Set the DNS domain or IP address on which your server is listening. Make sure to differentiate between https:// and http:// depending on whether you have SSL enabled.

# if your server has a domain name:
export SERVER_URL=https://my-nendo-server.com
# OR, if your server has only an IP address:
export SERVER_URL=https://192.168.0.1

When everything is configured according to your setup, simply use make run again to start the stack, open your browser and navigate to your domain / IP address to start using Nendo Platform.

Finally, change the password of the default user:

make set-password NEW_PASSWORD=mynewpassword

Development

Warning: Development mode is unsecure and should only be used in local environments.

Nendo Platform comes with a development mode in which the Nendo Web frontend and the Nendo API Server are started with debugging output and hot-reloading enabled.

First, build the development-mode images:

make setup-dev

Then start Nendo by calling:

make run-dev

Note: The hot-reloading only works with changes that are done to the application code, i.e. code that resides in the nendo_server/ subdirectory of nendo-server and in the src/ subdirectory of nendo-web accordingly. All changes to files outside those directories require rebuilding of the images, as explained below.

Now you can start developing your app by changing files in the repo/nendo-server and repo/nendo-web directories.

Tool development

Tools also come with development mode in which Nendo core and its plugins built into them from directories instead of by installing them directly from pypi. If you have used make setup-dev, you should see the directory build/dependencies/ which contains Nendo core and all the plugins used in the platform. Now you can make modifications to in those directories and then call make build-tools-gpu-dev (GPU mode) or make build-tools-cpu (CPU mode) to build them into the tools and have them available in the platform upon calling make run-dev.

Note: Since tools use pre-built docker images, you have to explicitly build the changes made to Nendo core or any of its plugins into the images. Hot-reloading is not supported here and will not be supported in the future.

Building

If you end up changing something about nendo-server or nendo-web that requires (re-)building of the images, you should use the respective make commands for that. To build both images (server and web):

make build-dev

To only build nendo-server:

make server-build
# OR, for development mode
make server-build-dev

To only build nendo-web:

make web-build
# OR, for development mode
make web-build-dev

Updating

To get the latest version of all involved repos and packages, use:

make update

Then you need to rebuild the stack:

make build
# OR, for development mode
make build-dev

Resetting

To completely erase the database and all associated audio files in the library, make sure the Nendo Platform is running and then call:

make flush

CAUTION: This will erase all data in your database and all audio files in the library/ folder. Make sure you understand the consequences before executing this command.

Debugging

To get the logs of the nendo-server docker container:

make server-logs

To get the logs of the nendo-web docker container:

make web-logs

To get a shell into the running nendo-server container:

make server-shell

To get a shell into the running nendo-web container:

make web-shell

Troubleshooting

I added/updated a package in nendo-web but it won't update the app

This is due to docker build caching. When chaning package.json, run once:

rm repo/nendo-web/package-lock.json repo/nendo-web/node_modules
make web-build-dev

To update the image.

The building of nendo-server fails with a checksum error

Try to build from scratch by first removing the existing image and clearing the docker build cache:

docker image rm nendo-server
docker builder prune
make server-build

I started Nendo but when I try to log in, I get the error Error logging in: {}

Most likely, Nendo has not fully booted up yet. To check, run make server-logs and verify that you see the line INFO Application startup complete.. Then try to log in again.

When I start Nendo, the server fails to build with UID 0 is not unique

When you encounter the following error during startup of Nendo:

=> ERROR [server-dev nendo-server-base 6/16] RUN useradd nendo --create-home -u 0 -g 0 -m -s /bin/bash 0.3s
0.318 useradd: UID 0 is not unique

Then you most likely tried to run the make build or make run as the root user or are using sudo to run it. This is not supported by Nendo. Please make sure you run any of the make commands as a non-root user and also make sure that the user you are running the commands with is in the docker group. To verify that, check the output of the id command and make sure you see (docker) there. Then proceed to run your make calls without sudo.

When I try to run a tool, I get a CUDA version mismatch error

Make sure you are using the right version of the NVIDIA container toolkit images for your hardware. Refer to the GPU requirements section for more information.

I have updated Nendo a few times and now Docker is using a lot of disk space

Upon rebuilding the images with newer versions of the Nendo platform a few times, docker can quickly start taking up a lot of disk space. What helps in these situations is to call docker system prune.