← Back to Magister Music

Magister Music User Guide

Magister Music is a macOS DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) for arranging audio and MIDI clips, hosting Audio Unit instruments and effects, editing MIDI, generating musical patterns, automating parameters, mixing tracks, and exporting finished audio.

This guide describes the app from a user perspective. It focuses on what you can do and where to find it.

Magister Music includes seven built-in instruments — Hyperion, a polyphonic subtractive synthesizer; Morpheus, a four-operator FM synthesizer; Vulcan, a supersaw ensemble synthesizer; Chronos, a plucked-string physical-modeling synthesizer; Polaris, a wavetable morphing synthesizer; Lumina, a character-analog hybrid synthesizer; and Apollo, a drum machine with a built-in step sequencer and pattern generator. All are available in the instrument picker out of the box — listed after any plug-ins you enable, so your own instruments stay closest at hand — need no setup, and travel with your songs (a project using them opens identically on any machine). You can also supply your own Audio Unit instrument plug-ins for a wider palette. The app additionally includes built-in MIDI effects (arpeggiator, chord, and more) and a full built-in audio effect rack — EQ, compressor, multiband compressor, limiter, gate, transient shaper, OTT, volume shaper, de-esser, saturator, reverb, delay, echo, chorus, doubler, flanger, phaser, tremolo, auto filter, distortion, bitcrusher, stereo imager, and utility; other audio processing comes from your own Audio Unit effect plug-ins.

The built-in plug-ins — the seven instruments, the twenty-three audio effects, and the MIDI effects — can be managed in Preferences > Audio Units just like external plug-ins: uncheck one to hide it from the pickers (tracks and songs already using it keep playing untouched), and assign any of them to plug-in groups to organize the menus. Everything ships enabled and ungrouped.

Before using Audio Unit instruments or effects in a song, open Preferences and choose the plug-ins you want Magister Music to make available. Selected plug-ins then appear in the instrument and effect selection controls in Arrangement view. These preferences are stored globally, so enabled instruments and effects are available across new songs you create.

Preferences also include the audio buffer size. The default value of 512 is recommended for most users, but if you notice latency, timing discontinuities, clicks, or pops during playback, you may adjust this setting to better suit your system and plug-in configuration.

What's New in 1.7.1

• Live plug-in editing: switching a track's instrument — and adding, removing, reordering, or bypassing a track's effects — no longer stops the song. The track's chain is swapped in place while everything else keeps playing, and the track rejoins in sync. Toggling the metronome mid-song is seamless the same way.
• Note Details: the Piano Roll's note dialog (double-click a note, or press Return/Enter with notes selected) now edits velocity (1–127) and probability alongside start and length. With several notes selected, a field whose values differ across the selection comes up blank — leave it blank to change nothing, or type a value to set it on every selected note.
• Automation multi-select: drag a rectangle across empty lane space to select several points, then drag or arrow-nudge the group as one (its shape preserved), copy and paste it into any lane — another parameter, another track, or the master — at the playhead, or press Backspace to delete it.
• Collapsed-track meters and a transport scope: collapsed Arrangement rows show a slim stereo level meter beside the Solo button (on by default, with an Interface toggle), and an optional oscilloscope of the master output draws beside the Beat readout in your playhead color (Preferences > Interface, off by default).
• Sample Editor: a dedicated Play button auditions the edited clip from its own start, wherever the song playhead is — Return (or keypad Enter) toggles it — with gain, fades, reverse, pitch, and stretch applied. A sliced clip now opens at its own sound instead of the source file's head, and the waveform draws at full resolution from the moment the editor opens.
• Clip commands grew up: right-click Clip Gain..., Fade In.../Fade Out..., and Resize Clip... apply to every selected clip at once. The fade dialogs remember the last length you used, Replicate... remembers your last variation choice, and the gain dialog covers the Sample Editor's full -60 to +24 dB range. Colors picked in Set Color now travel with the clip through duplicates, copies, and slicing.
• Menus sorted by reach: the Add-effect menu lists your own plug-ins first, then the built-in audio effects, with the built-in MIDI effects last — and the instrument picker likewise lists the built-in instruments after your own.
• Recording: every take draws its live waveform as it is captured — later takes over existing material are as visible as the first.
• Fixes and polish: reversed or faded slices (including time-stretched ones) render exactly their own audio; chords no longer max out and distort on hot presets in Morpheus, Vulcan, Polaris, and Lumina; the arpeggiator no longer produces occasional loud or pitch-bent retriggers; built-in effect and MIDI effect panels float above the main window like Audio Unit editors and join Toggle Plug-in Windows; and plug-in undo steps restore only the parameters an edit actually changed.

What's New in 1.7.0

• Apollo: a built-in drum machine. Eleven slots — eight semantic (Kick, Snare, Clap, Closed Hat, Open Hat, Tom, Perc, Cymbal) plus three free Other lanes — each hold a one-shot sample: synthesized factory 808/909 drums out of the box, or your own files by drag-and-drop, paste, or a file chooser. Imported drums join an app-wide Apollo library reusable across songs (with User and Delete menus right in each slot), and every sample a song uses travels inside the song package. A step-sequencer grid lays down timing and velocity per slot — left-click adds a hit, right-click removes it, dragging, the scroll wheel, or the arrow keys over a hovered hit shape velocity (drawn as opacity) — with resolutions from 1/8 to 1/32 including triplets, swing, per-pass Jitter and Vel Var humanize, fill actions, and pattern lengths from 1 to 16 bars. Patterns play grid-locked to the song: any note in a MIDI clip gates the pattern as if it had been running since bar 1, and additional patterns can be triggered by specific pitches for fills and song sections. A role-aware generator rolls new patterns in fifteen styles with per-slot density and row locks — keep the kick, re-roll the hats; the free Other lanes are never touched. Per-slot level, pan, and tune are automatable; slots have mute, solo, velocity sensitivity, and choke groups; kits and patterns each carry the standard preset cluster with twenty-five factory patterns, favorites, and user presets; and the panel is horizontally resizable, remembering its width. While the pattern plays, a playhead in your configured playhead color sweeps the grid at the display's full refresh rate, lighting each hit as it fires.
• Lumina: a sixth built-in synthesizer — a character-analog subtractive hybrid whose oscillators misbehave on purpose (per-voice drift and envelope slop) feeding hard sync, ring mod, cross-mod, or a wavefolder into a tanh-driven four-pole ladder filter that sings and self-oscillates, with 58 hand-curated presets.
• Seven new built-in audio effects join the rack, every one with the full preset cluster and twenty-five factory presets: the Volume Shaper pumps and ducks any track on a tempo-synced curve (depth, hold, rise, and curve controls) that locks its phase to the song's beat grid while the transport plays — realigning at loop restarts and tempo changes — for the sidechain feel with no routing; OTT brings the modern three-band upward+downward compression sound (depth, time, and per-band trims); the Gate covers both classic threshold gating (attack/hold/release/range) and a rhythmic mode that chops any audio on a note division, beat-locked to the transport like the Volume Shaper — a trance gate without a sidechain; the Transient Shaper designs attack and sustain independently with no threshold to chase; the De-Esser tames sibilance with split-band compression and a Listen solo; the Stereo Imager sets mid/side width per band (mono the lows, widen the highs) with adjustable crossovers; and Utility is the everyday glue tool — gain trim, equal-power pan, width, polarity invert, and mono fold. All fully automatable and manageable in Preferences like the rest of the rack.
• Dragging a selection in the Arrangement now auto-scrolls vertically (and horizontally) when the pointer reaches the edge of the track area, and keeps scrolling while the pointer rests there — the marquee grows across tracks as the view follows.
• In-app updates: Magister Music now keeps itself current. The app checks for new versions at launch and about once a day, offering the update with its release notes; Magister Music > Check for Updates... checks on demand. Updates download, verify, and install in place.
• Right-drag erasing: hold the right mouse button and sweep to delete several notes at once — in the Piano Roll and in Apollo's pattern grid alike. A plain right-click still deletes a single note (or the whole selection, when the note is part of one).
• Interface preferences: meters normally pause while a plug-in window is open so its interface stays smooth — a new Preferences > Interface toggle keeps them running instead; and Collapsed track padding adds breathing room to collapsed Arrangement rows if the tightest layout is too dense for your taste.

What's New in 1.6.0

• Hyperion: a built-in polyphonic subtractive synthesizer — two anti-aliased oscillators with stereo width, noise, a resonant multi-mode filter with key tracking, dual ADSR envelopes, an assignable LFO, glide with mono-legato, sustain-pedal support, 16 voices, and a built-in effects stage with chorus, ping-pong delay, and reverb. Always first in the instrument picker with no setup, 146 hand-curated factory presets grouped by Bass / Lead / Pad / Keys / Pluck with previous/next stepping, settings saved inside the song, and every knob automatable. With no plug-ins enabled, new MIDI tracks pick it automatically — the app now makes sound out of the box.
• Morpheus: a second built-in synthesizer, this one a four-operator FM instrument for everything a filter can't carve — organs, electric pianos, deep basses, warm stabs and brass, evolving pads. Four sine operators with ratio, detune, level, and full ADSR each; eight routing algorithms from a deep serial stack to pure additive, with the panel badging each operator as carrier or modulator as you switch; operator-4 feedback for edge; a global tone filter; an LFO for vibrato, tremolo, or brightness; glide with mono-legato; and the same chorus, ping-pong delay, and reverb stage as Hyperion. 91 hand-curated factory presets across Keys / Bass / Lead / Pad / Pluck with previous/next stepping, a dice button for a random patch, and arrow-key nudging (or the scroll wheel) on whichever knob you hover — Left/Right fine, Up/Down coarse.
• Vulcan: a third built-in synthesizer — a unison/ensemble machine in the classic supersaw lineage. Each voice stacks up to seven detuned oscillators (saw or square) spread across the stereo field with blend and width controls, a centered sub oscillator to keep the low end solid, a resonant multi-mode filter with bipolar envelope and key tracking, dual ADSR envelopes, an LFO with four shapes (square gives the classic trance gate) targeting pitch, cutoff, or amplitude, glide with mono-legato, 12 voices, and the chorus / ping-pong delay / reverb stage shared with its siblings. 145 hand-curated presets across Pad / Pluck / Lead / Bass / Stab, with the full preset cluster — previous/next, dice, and heart marking.
• Chronos: a fourth built-in synthesizer — plucked-string physical modeling. Every note excites two slightly detuned string models (tuned feedback delay lines with a damping filter — the actual physics of a vibrating string), so nylon and steel guitars, harps, kotos, mallets, and felted mutes ring and decay like real instruments. Pick or mallet excitation, pick hardness and position, dual-string detune with stereo spread, a resonant guitar-body model, brightness/decay/release string envelope, vibrato and tremolo LFO, and the shared chorus / ping-pong delay / reverb stage. 55 launch presets across Strings / Harp / Mallet / Muted / Hybrid with the full preset cluster.
• User presets: every built-in synthesizer and audio effect can now save your own presets. Tweak any preset and press the save button in the preset cluster — a dialog suggests the source preset's name with a "Mod" suffix (rename it as you like); once a preset of yours is active, saving again silently updates it. Your presets appear in a "User" category at the bottom of the preset menu, and the arrows, dice, and favorites toggle treat them exactly like factory presets. Songs remember which preset every synth and effect instance was on: reopening a project restores the preset name in the panel (as long as that preset still exists — the saved settings load either way).
• One preset cluster everywhere: every built-in synthesizer and audio effect now shares the same preset controls — previous/next arrows, the current preset name opening a menu, a dice for a random pick, a heart that marks favorites (saved per instrument/effect), and a heart-circle toggle that restricts the arrows and dice to favorites only. The EQ, Compressor, Limiter, Multiband, and Saturator gain factory preset banks of their own (from Vocal Presence and Kick Punch EQ curves to Master Glue multiband and Tape Warmth saturation), bringing all sixteen effects to a uniform twenty-five factory presets each.
• Built-ins in Preferences: the built-in synthesizers, audio effects, and MIDI effects appear in a Built-In section of Preferences > Audio Units with the same controls as external plug-ins — uncheck one to hide it from the pickers (tracks and songs already using it keep playing untouched), or assign it to a plug-in group to organize the menus. Everything ships enabled and ungrouped.
• Hover control everywhere: in every built-in synthesizer and effect panel, the arrow keys (Left/Right fine, Up/Down coarse) and the scroll wheel adjust whichever knob or slider you hover — the same gesture language as the rest of the app. Preset stepping lives in the preset cluster's buttons.
• Clip colors: right-click a clip and pick from the Set Color submenu's nine computed swatches derived from the track's hue — recolor one clip or a whole multi-selection at once.
• Polaris: a fifth built-in synthesizer — a wavetable morphing machine in the modern workstation lineage. Two oscillators scan through ten band-limited wavetables (analog morphs, PWM, vowels, growls, glass, hollow combs, saw stacks, digital sparkle, breath, and sync sweeps), and a dedicated Motion section — a position envelope plus a position LFO per oscillator — sweeps the timbre while a note sustains, which is what makes wavetable sound alive. Up to seven-voice unison with detune/blend/width, a centered sub and noise, the resonant multi-mode filter with bipolar envelope, dual ADSRs, a global LFO (pitch/cutoff/amp in four shapes), glide with mono-legato, and a Gloss knob — an OTT-style three-band upward+downward compressor for that polished modern sheen — ahead of the shared chorus / ping-pong delay / reverb stage. 130 hand-curated presets across Pad / Pluck / Lead / Bass / Keys with the full preset cluster.
• EQ: a built-in eight-band parametric equalizer with an interactive frequency-response editor — drag band nodes right on the curve (vertical drag sets gain, or Q on pass/notch bands and with Option held; the scroll wheel also shapes Q), right-click a node to switch its type between Bell, Low/High Shelf, High/Low Pass, and Notch, choose a cut slope from 12 up to 96 dB/octave on the pass filters, and watch a real-time spectrum analyzer of the EQ's output behind the curve. Every band's frequency, gain, and Q — and the output trim — are automatable, with frequency lanes sweeping logarithmically and the editor animating as lanes play.
• Multiband: a built-in three-band compressor — the signal splits at two draggable Linkwitz-Riley crossovers (they sum perfectly flat), and each band gets its own threshold, ratio, attack, release, makeup, bypass, and solo with live per-band gain-reduction meters over the spectrum analyzer. Each band can also key on the matching range of a sidechain track instead of itself: mark the low band Ext Key with a kick as the source and only your lows duck when the kick hits, leaving mids and highs untouched. Band parameters and both crossovers are automatable.
• Reverb: a built-in algorithmic reverb on a modulated eight-line feedback delay network — pre-delay, size, decay from 0.2 to 20 seconds, damping, low/high cut, modulation, early/late balance, width, and mix, plus a Freeze that holds the tail forever for pad-making. Twenty-five factory presets from Ambience to Cathedral (they shape the space and leave your mix knob alone), a live output spectrum, and every continuous control automatable with decay and the tone filters on logarithmic lanes.
• Ten more built-in effects complete the rack: Delay (tempo-synced or free, ping-pong, tone-filtered feedback, stereo offset), Echo (tape-style with wobble, drive, damping, and input-keyed ducking that blooms in the gaps — feedback past 100% self-oscillates without blowing up), Chorus (up to four golden-angle-spread voices), Doubler (constant micro-pitch-shifted doubles — no LFO warble — with slow humanizing drift, width, and a low cut that keeps the low end mono: clean thickening built for synths), Flanger (bipolar feedback), Phaser (4–12 allpass stages), Tremolo (four shapes, tempo sync, 180° phase for auto-pan), Auto Filter (state-variable filter with LFO in four shapes including sample-and-hold, tempo sync, and an envelope follower for touch-wah), Distortion (five curves from overdrive to wavefolding with bias, tone, and auto gain), and Bitcrusher (fractional bit depth plus sample-and-hold downsampling). Every continuous control is automatable with musical log-scaled lanes where it counts, and delay times, tremolo, and filter LFOs can lock to note divisions from 1/1 to 1/32 including dotted and triplet.
• Saturator: a built-in saturation effect joins the compressor and limiter — three characters (Tape's smooth odd harmonics, Tube's warm even harmonics, Hard's outright clip), Drive, parallel Mix, Output trim, and an Auto Gain switch that keeps loudness steady while drive shapes the tone. Works on tracks, buses, and the master; Drive, Mix, and Output are automatable with the panel sliders animating as lanes play.

What's New in 1.5.1

• Again: Edit > Again (Cmd+R, remappable) repeats your last repeatable action against whatever is selected now — variations, velocity shapes, quantize, clip operations, volume steps, and dozens more. Run a variation on one clip, select three others, press Cmd+R.
• Generate from Preset: right-click any MIDI clip to run the generator on it with one of your saved presets — or let Generate from Random Preset roll a different preset per clip in a multi-selection. The app now ships with a factory set of generator presets, and Preferences > Interface gains buttons to clear all presets or restore the factory set.
• Clips remember the generator: double-clicking a generator-made clip opens the Generator, while hand-drawn and recorded clips open the Piano Roll — and editing a generated clip by hand in the Piano Roll hands it back. The variation menu items follow the same rule, generator runs name their clips with clean unique numbers, and regenerating a looped clip always keeps its length and repetition structure.
• Replicate: right-click a clip and lay down any number of copies end to end, with a count stepper and — for generated clips — an optional variation rolled fresh for each copy. One undo removes the whole run.
• Clip repetitions: Option+Right/Option+Left (and matching context-menu items) add or remove one repetition of the clip's pattern per press. The same keys resize the loop region by grid multiples while hovering the loop strip, and step selected note lengths by the toolbar unit in the Piano Roll.
• Length by drag: Option-drag the right edge of a clip that is not yet repeating to change the clip's length on the grid — the clip grows or shrinks without starting to repeat. Repeated clips keep the normal span drag; exact lengths remain available from the context menu's Resize Clip.
• 1/64 resolution: the arrangement grid and the Piano Roll's Timing and Length presets now reach 1/64, and the Timing/Length groups also gained 2- and 4-bar presets.
• Sample Editor upgrades: sample-accurate waveform detail at deep zoom, slip editing (Option-drag to slide the audio under a fixed clip window), click-free zero-crossing trims when Snap is off, a Normalize button beside the gain slider, and an Invert button that flips the clip's polarity.
• Piano Roll: Cmd+D duplicates the selected notes one selection-span to the right — press repeatedly to walk a phrase along — and the loop-nudge shortcuts shift selected notes by their own lengths.
• Mixer: Shift-click range-selects clips in the timeline overview exactly like the Arrangement, and a clip picked in the Mixer opens directly in the Piano Roll, Generator, or Sample Editor.
• Window-scoped undo: plug-in windows undo only their own edits and the main window undoes only app edits, with a proceed-anyway option when you want to cross over.
• Seamless output-device changes: when your audio output follows the system default and the default device changes mid-song, playback now restarts itself on the new device at the current position.
• Note Timing dialog: double-click a note — or press Return with notes selected — to type its exact start and length, in beats or whole notes, as decimals (2.5) or fractions (1 1/4). With several notes selected, the typed start moves the selection together and the typed length applies to each; a field you leave untouched changes nothing.
• Merge Notes: a new button beside the scissors (with a mappable shortcut) glues each pitch's selected notes into one note spanning them, gaps included — the inverse of slicing.
• Probability at a glance: a note's translucency now shows its probability — certain notes draw opaque, chance notes fade toward ghosts — complementing the probability lane.
• Piano Roll flow: Esc deselects all notes (remappable), in-key clicks add notes even while a selection is active (out-of-key clicks deselect), clicking inside an already-selected note parks the playhead at the exact clicked spot while stopped (ready for Split at Playhead), note-length drags snap to the Length setting instead of the grid, and the Beats field answers hover arrow keys (Left/Right ±1, Up/Down ±4). Legato boundaries now come from the notes being operated on, and quantized lengths floor at one full Length step.
• Mixer timeline: dragging across the overview lanes sweeps out a clip-selecting marquee exactly like the Arrangement — loop-region editing lives in the header strip, which now autoscrolls at the view edges during drags — and the timeline's scrollbar, zooming, and scroll tracking got a round of fixes.
• Polish: Reverse and Merge Clips in the clip context menu, sliced pieces take unique numbered names, dragged automation points snap to matching values with a horizontal guide (and multi-clip drags show only the selection's outer guides), the loop-length field answers hover arrow keys, and the tempo and beats fields slimmed down.

What's New in 1.5.0

• Modulators: LFO and Macro strips that live beside the buses and drive any learned plug-in parameter — or track volume/pan — on any number of tracks at once. Tempo-synced waveforms with phase and depth, per-target ranges, and a beat-locked waveform lane drawn across the Arrangement timeline. Playback and export follow identically.
• Count-in: a menu next to the metronome button adds one or two bars of click before a recording started from stopped begins — the take starts exactly when the count ends.
• Generator Follow: point the Generator at another MIDI clip — a chord progression, a drone, anything — and generated notes stay inside the notes sounding in that clip at each moment. Rests hold the last chord, and a disabled clip works as a silent guide.
• Bezier automation curves: a new Bezier curve mode per automation lane, with a draggable diamond handle on every segment that bends the curve toward it. Right-click a handle to straighten its segment. Playback and export follow the drawn curve exactly.
• Chord readout: the bottom-right of the window names the chord under the playhead while the Piano Roll or Generator is open — live during playback, and as you click around while stopped.
• Sample Browser Sync tempo: a checkbox that auditions loops at the song tempo, time-stretching the preview to the project BPM. One-shots and full songs play untouched.
• Clip variations: right-click any generated MIDI clip for instant re-rolls without leaving the Arrangement — Near Variation keeps either the pitches or the rhythm, Variation regenerates under a different model, and Distant Variation additionally shakes up pattern, temperature, and variances. Probability bars are never touched, multi-selections vary every selected clip, and one undo restores them all.
• One-click dynamics on the clip menu: Velocity Variation gives every note a slight random push around its current velocity, and Crescendo/Decrescendo ramp the clip's dynamics while keeping accents intact. All three apply to every selected clip.
• Macro lanes reach full automation parity: a curve menu with every automation mode including Bezier with draggable handles, points that select on click and answer arrow-key nudges and Backspace, values that snap to a neighbor's value for effortless flat runs, and a Value slider that animates with the drawn curve.
• Editing while a loop plays is seamless across the board: moving clips between tracks, pasting, duplicating, and resizing no longer interrupt the other tracks.
• Sample Browser: Match Key results follow the song's key the moment it changes, and Space toggles song playback right from the browser.
• Note probability: give any note a chance to play — set a percentage in the Piano Roll's probability lane and each loop pass rolls the dice independently, so a static pattern gains living variation.

What's New in 1.4.0

• Built-in compressor and limiter: dynamics effects with gain-reduction metering and sidechain keying from any MIDI or audio track, available on tracks, buses, and the master. Their parameters can be automated, and the panel sliders animate as automation plays.
• Mute automation: a binary Mute lane gates a track's output over time with step-style points that snap to on/off.
• Automation travels with clips: moving or nudging clips — including to another track — carries their automation along, with a ghost preview of the traveling curve during the drag and a prompt when the destination already has conflicting automation.
• Automation lanes can show dimmed ghost curves of the track's other lanes for lining up moves.
• Open plug-in windows follow drawn automation when you click around the timeline while playback is stopped, not just while playing.
• Plug-in editor windows were overhauled: the plug-in owns its size and the window follows exactly, fixing oversized or cut-off editors.
• Multi-selection commands throughout: renaming, resizing, slicing, ripple-deleting, and the other context actions apply to every selected clip, and mute, solo, freeze, unfreeze, convert to audio, rename, color, and expand/collapse apply to every selected track.
• Mixer refinements: the track name sidebar sizes itself to the longest name, clips can be selected in the timeline overview to aim the loop command, clip selection carries over between Arrangement and Mixer, hovering a fader arms the arrow keys for keyboard nudges, and meters move fluidly at the display's refresh rate.
• Welcome screen: one-click lists of recent songs and recent templates, plus a From Template button that starts a new untitled song as a copy of an existing one.
• Changing the project scale can conform existing MIDI notes to the new key by degree mapping.
• Track colors: a redesigned pastel preset palette, editable in Preferences; the track selection highlight uses the track's own color.
• Arrangement track controls can sit on the left or right side of the timeline (Preferences > Interface).
• Timeline polish: 2-bar and 4-bar grid values, bar numbering that sticks to powers of two at every zoom, mappable loop-nudge shortcuts, and tempo nudging with the arrow keys while hovering the tempo field.
• Clip editing: the whole right edge of a looping clip drags its loop length, exact lengths are set from the context menu, Up and Down arrows move selected clips to the nearest matching track, and Delete Time preserves looping MIDI structure on mid-iteration cuts.
• Generator I/O: a virtual Magister Notes MIDI output and a Magister Sync clock input let external gear and apps play along with the generator.
• All audio media is standardized to stereo 48 kHz at import, recording, and project open, eliminating sample-rate drift.
• Exports capture each plug-in's exact current state and honor track and master faders precisely.
• Moving the loop region and editing clips during playback is now seamless.

What's New in 1.3.0

• Audio recording: capture a microphone or audio interface into audio tracks, with live input metering, a growing take preview, and loop-cycle takes you can switch between.
• Sample Editor view (Cmd+5): a zoomed, non-destructive editor for audio clips — trim, fades with selectable curves, gain, pitch shift, slice, reverse, and takes.
• Sample Browser: a floating window for auditioning and placing samples from your own folders.
• Buses and sends: shared effect channels with their own strips, meters, effect chains, and automation.
• Track freeze and Convert to Audio Track: render a MIDI track's instrument and effects in place to lighten playback, or bounce it to a permanent audio track.
• Export Stems renders each audible track to its own WAV file.
• Fourteen built-in MIDI effects (Arpeggiator, Chord, Transpose, Scale, Strum, Ratchet, Euclid, Note Echo, Swing, Humanize, Chance, Length, Velocity, Mirror), plus a bake command that prints the chain into the notes.
• Effect chain presets: save a whole effects stack under a name and recall it in any song, on tracks, buses, or the master.
• MIDI file support: drag .mid/.midi files onto MIDI tracks or the empty timeline, and export MIDI clips from their context menu.
• Undo History panel: browse the session's edits and jump to any state.
• Metronome click track sized to the song tempo.
• Follow mode: the arrangement auto-scrolls with playback.
• Loudness tools: export normalization to an adjustable LUFS target, and live LUFS readouts on the master strip.
• Piano Roll additions: an editable velocity lane below the grid, ghost notes from other tracks, diatonic chord stamps, legato, and swing applied by quantize.
• Audio clip tools: clip gain and fades (with linear, S-curve, exponential, and logarithmic ramps), pitch shift, reverse, normalize, split/strip/trim silence, ripple delete, and Fit to Grid.
• Plug-in groups: organize enabled plug-ins into named submenu folders for the instrument and effect pickers.
• Track color picker: custom colors join the palette as persistent swatches shared across songs.
• Autosave with crash recovery, and an audio output device picker in Preferences.
• Over forty additional actions can be given custom keyboard shortcuts in Preferences > Shortcuts.
• Interface: background tint up to a fully colored theme, configurable playhead and note colors, per-song timeline zoom, and drops of audio or MIDI files on the empty timeline region to create matching tracks.
• New songs start empty: add your first track from the toolbar, the Track menu, or by dropping a file.

Known Limitations

• Magister Music has been tested with a limited number of third-party plug-ins and MIDI devices, and we are continuing to expand compatibility coverage.
• Very dense sessions or unusually heavy plug-ins can still stress the host Mac. If you hear timing discontinuities, clicks, or pops, try increasing the audio buffer size in Preferences and closing unneeded plug-in windows.
• Plug-in editor windows size themselves to the plug-in's interface. To change a plug-in's size, use the plug-in's own resize control (usually a corner grip or a zoom/size menu inside its window); the window follows automatically.
• Songs use 4/4 time throughout: bars, the grids, the metronome, the Generator, and Apollo's patterns all assume four beats per bar. Other time signatures are not yet supported.

Core Concepts

• A song is made of tracks.
• Audio tracks contain audio clips or pasted audio samples.
• MIDI tracks contain MIDI clips and usually play through an instrument plug-in.
• Tracks can have effects, volume, pan, mute, solo, meters, and automation.
• Mute and solo affect the track's mixer output, while MIDI instruments and effects continue running internally.
• The master channel controls the final output.
• The loop region controls repeated playback and several timeline editing commands.
• Selected clips can be edited together for moving, looping, enabling, disabling, copying, deleting, and duplicating.
• Audio clips show waveform previews in the timeline after import or paste.

Starting a Song

The welcome screen shown when no song is open offers New Song, From Template... (start a new untitled song as a copy of an existing song), and Open Song..., plus one-click lists of your recent songs and the songs you recently used as templates.

1. 1. Choose File > New Song, or press Cmd+N. A new song starts with no tracks.
2. 2. Add tracks from Track > Add Audio Track or Track > Add MIDI Track, the Arrangement toolbar's Audio and MIDI buttons, or by dropping an audio or MIDI file on the empty timeline.
3. 3. For a MIDI track, choose an instrument plug-in from the track controls.
4. 4. Add a MIDI clip with Studio > Add MIDI Clip or Cmd+Shift+M.
5. 5. Edit the clip in Arrangement, Piano Roll, or Generator view.
6. 6. Use the Loop control to repeat a section while working.
7. 7. Save with File > Save Song or Cmd+S.

Only one song window is open at a time. If a song is already open, close it before creating a new song; opening another song replaces the current open song after any save prompt.

Evaluation Mode and Registration

Magister Music can be downloaded and used for free in evaluation mode. In evaluation mode, the title bar shows [UNREGISTERED - SAVE/EXPORT DISABLED] after the Magister Music title.

Evaluation mode lets you create songs, open songs, edit tracks and clips, use Audio Unit plug-ins, use the piano roll and generator, arrange playback, mix, and automate. The following features are disabled until a valid license key is registered:

• Save Song and Save Song As, including Cmd+S and Cmd+Shift+S.
• Export WAV, Export M4A, and Export MP3, including Cmd+Shift+E for WAV export.
• Copy MIDI from Piano Roll view and Generator view.
• The Generator's MIDI Out stream to other apps and gear.

To register, choose Magister Music > Register License Key..., then enter the email address and license key you received. The license key can be long, so the registration window provides a wide entry field. If validation succeeds, the app shows a green checkmark, stores the registration in app preferences, removes the unregistered title-bar notice, and immediately enables saving, exporting, and MIDI copy.

You can obtain a license key by visiting the Magister.ai home page.

Main Views

Use the tabs at the top of the app, the View menu, or the command-number shortcuts:

• Cmd+1: Arrangement
• Cmd+2: Mixer
• Cmd+3: Piano Roll
• Cmd+4: Generator
• Cmd+5: Sample Editor
• Tab: Toggle Arrangement/Mixer or Piano Roll/Generator, depending on the current view (from the Sample Editor, Tab returns to Arrangement)

Arrangement

Arrangement view is the main timeline editor. Use it to create tracks, place clips, select time ranges, set loop regions, edit automation, and manage plug-ins on each track.

Mixer

Mixer view is for monitoring and mixing. It shows a compact timeline overview at the top and mixer-style track controls with vertical meters at the bottom. The mixer is intended for viewing many levels at once without editing clips in the timeline overview.

Piano Roll

Piano Roll view edits the notes inside the selected MIDI clip. Select a MIDI clip in Arrangement view, then switch to Piano Roll. The ghost-notes button (next to the zoom slider) shows other MIDI tracks' notes dimmed behind the clip you are editing, for lining up harmonies and rhythms across tracks.

Sample Editor

Sample Editor view is the audio counterpart of the Piano Roll: a zoomed editor for the selected audio clip. Double-click an audio clip in Arrangement view to open it.

Generator

Generator view is a statistical mechanism for rapidly generating musical ideas inside the selected MIDI clip, including novel chord and melody patterns. It is designed for fast iteration: choose musical parameters, generate a pattern, listen, adjust the probabilities, and generate again until something useful emerges.

Metronome

The metronome button in the transport bar (next to Follow) plays a click during playback — a higher-pitched accent on each bar, ticks on the other beats — sized exactly to the song tempo. It rides the normal playback engine as a hidden track, stays audible while other tracks are soloed, and is never included in exports, stems, or frozen tracks. Toggling it while the song plays never interrupts the music — the click simply drops in or out. The setting persists across launches.

Undo History

Every edit in a session is kept on an undo timeline (up to 80 steps). Besides Cmd+Z / Cmd+Shift+Z, the clock button in the top toolbar opens the History panel: redoable states are listed above the highlighted current state, past states below it, each labeled with the edit that produced it and how long ago it happened. Click any row to jump the whole project to that state in one step — jumping back leaves the newer states available for redo until you make a new edit, exactly like repeated single undos. History is per-session and is not saved into the song file.

Undo is window-scoped: a plug-in window undoes and redoes only the changes made from that plug-in, and the main window undoes only app edits. When the next undoable step belongs to a plug-in whose window is open, the main window asks before crossing over — choose Undo Anyway to step through that plug-in's contiguous run of edits.

Edit > Again (Cmd+R, remappable in Preferences > Shortcuts) repeats the last repeatable action against the current selection: variations, velocity shapes, quantize, clip repetitions, replicate runs, volume steps, and many more. The menu item shows what it will repeat (for example Again: Distant Variation), parameters such as a preset choice or a typed resize length are remembered, and targets re-resolve — run an edit on one clip, select others, and press Cmd+R.

Transport and Top Toolbar

The top toolbar contains grouped controls that apply across the app:

• Play/Pause: start or stop playback. Press Space.
• Return to Start: move the playhead to the beginning. Press Home.
• Jump to End: move the playhead to the end of the last clip. Press End.
• Previous/Next Bar: move the playhead by bar. Press Page Up or Page Down.
• Record: record into the selected track — incoming MIDI on a MIDI track, or audio input (microphone or audio interface) on an audio track. Press F9.
• Loop: enable or disable the current loop region. The field beside the checkbox shows the loop region's length in beats; type a new value to resize the loop from its start, or hover the field and press the arrow keys (Left/Right ±1 beat, Up/Down ±4).
• Follow: when enabled, the Arrangement view scrolls automatically to keep the playhead visible during playback.
• Metronome: toggle the click track (see Metronome below).
• Count: choose a recording count-in of one or two bars (or Off). When you start recording from a stopped transport, that many bars of metronome click play first, and recording begins exactly when the count ends. Punching in while the song is already playing records immediately.
• Beat: shows the current playhead position in beats.
• Tempo: enter the song tempo, or hover the field and press the arrow keys to nudge it (Left/Right ±1 BPM, Up/Down ±5).
• Scale menu: choose the current key and scale. Major and Minor scales are grouped inside the menu.
• Automation mode: choose Off, Read, Touch, or Write.
• DSP: shows how much of the audio render deadline playback is using. If enabled in Preferences > Interface, a red counter appears when render overloads or missed deadlines occur; rising counts suggest increasing the audio buffer size in Preferences.
• Preferences: open app preferences.

When playback starts, Arrangement view and the Mixer timeline overview center the starting playhead position when possible.

Recording Audio

Magister Music can record audio input — a microphone or audio interface — into audio tracks.

1. 1. Save your song first: recordings are stored inside the song package, so a new song must be saved before recording audio.
2. 2. Choose an input device in Preferences > Audio > Input Device, or leave it on System Default.
3. 3. Select an audio track and press the Record button (or F9). Playback starts from the playhead and capture begins; macOS will ask for microphone permission the first time. With a count-in set in the transport's Count menu, the metronome counts that many bars first and the take begins on the downbeat.
4. 4. Press Record, Space, or Stop to finish. The take appears as an ordinary audio clip on the track, aligned to where you played, and is saved with the song.

While recording, a growing red region on the target track shows the material being captured — its waveform drawing in live as you play, on every take — and a level meter beside the Record button shows the live input signal — green for healthy levels, red when close to clipping. When a recording covers existing clips on the track, the covered material is trimmed away and replaced by the new recording.

Recording with looping enabled captures takes: recording continues through each pass of the loop, and every pass becomes a take on a single clip spanning the loop region. The newest take plays by default; a badge on the clip shows which take is active (for example 3/5). Right-click the clip and open the Takes menu to switch takes, delete the current take, or keep only the current take. Recording again over the same span stacks another take onto the same clip. Anything played before the first full loop pass — a lead-in, or a partial first pass — lands as its own clip so nothing you played is lost.

Recordings that are discarded before saving are cleaned out of the song package automatically.

Looping

The loop region is a selected range of time that repeats during playback.

• Drag in the timeline header to define a loop region.
• Enable or disable looping with the Loop checkbox or Cmd+L.
• If clips are selected, the Toggle Loop command sets the loop region around the selected clip range.
• If no clips are selected but an empty time range is selected, Toggle Loop sets the loop region to that selected range.
• If the selected clip range or selected empty time range is already the current loop region, Toggle Loop turns looping off.
• Pressing Play starts from the visible playhead position.
• If looping is enabled and the playhead sits at its default position rather than one you placed, play begins at the loop start.
• If you place the playhead before the loop region, playback includes the lead-in material and continues into the loop.
• Pausing past the end of an enabled loop returns the next play to the loop region.
• While the pointer is over the loop region header in Arrangement, or over the timeline overview in Mixer, the Left and Right arrow keys nudge the loop region ahead or back by its own length.
• With the pointer over the loop region header, Option+Right and Option+Left grow or shrink the loop region to the next multiple of the current arrangement grid — a 2-beat region with a grid of 4 grows to 4, then 8, 12, and so on.
• Moving the loop region while playing does not intentionally stop or restart playback.
• Extending the loop region while playing takes effect on the current pass through the loop.
• When a loop region is moved forward during playback, the transition into the new region is handled like continuing through the song timeline when possible.
• At transport loop boundaries, Magister Music repairs missing MIDI starts where possible without retriggering notes that are meant to continue smoothly across the boundary.
• Audio clips and MIDI clips both follow the transport loop region during playback.

Loop regions are also used by:

• Insert Silence
• Delete Time
• Add MIDI Clip fallback when no time selection exists

Arrangement View

Arrangement Toolbar

Arrangement view has its own toolbar:

• Grid buttons: choose the arrangement snap/grid value, from 1/32 through 2- and 4-bar grids.
• Insert Silence at Loop Region: insert empty time where the loop region is. Shortcut: Cmd+I.
• Delete Time in Loop Region: remove the time covered by the loop region and shift later clips and automation left. Shortcut: Cmd+Shift+Delete or Cmd+Shift+Forward Delete.
• Slice: slice the selected clip at the playhead (available while playback is stopped). You can also slice from a clip's right-click menu at the clicked position.
• Ripple Delete (right-click): delete the clip and close the gap — later clips and automation on that track slide left.
• Normalize (audio, right-click): set the clip's gain so its loudest sample plays at -1 dBFS.
• Clip Gain (audio, right-click): type the clip's gain in dB — the same -60 to +24 range as the Sample Editor's gain slider.
• Fade In / Fade Out (audio, right-click): type the fade length in beats; 0 removes the fade. The dialogs remember the last length you entered, so applying the same fade across clips is right-click, Return.
• Clip Gain, the fades, and Resize Clip all apply to every selected clip when the clicked clip is part of a multi-selection — the menu items show the count.
• Split at Silence (audio, right-click): split the clip at the boundaries of its silent regions — every piece, audible and silent, becomes its own clip.
• Strip Silence (audio, right-click): the same split, but the silent pieces are removed, leaving clips only where there is audible material.
• Trim Silence from Edges (audio, right-click): one click trims silence from the head and tail of the clip, leaving the audible material.
• Fit to Grid (audio, right-click): stretch the clip's end to the nearest gridline, time-stretching its audio to match.
• Near Variation / Variation / Distant Variation (generated MIDI, right-click): re-roll a generated clip in place without opening the Generator — see Generator View.
• Velocity Variation (MIDI, right-click): give every note a slight but noticeable random velocity offset around its current value. The dynamics shape survives, and repeating the command compounds the effect.
• Crescendo / Decrescendo (MIDI, right-click): ramp note velocities across the clip, scaling each note from its current velocity so accents and ghost notes keep their relationship — the loud end of the gesture stays put and the quiet end lands around a third of its former level.
• Export MIDI... (MIDI, right-click): save the clip as a standard .midi file.
• Merge: merge selected MIDI clips or selected audio clips on one track into one clip. Unnamed clips stay unnamed when merged; named clips combine their names with /.
• Reverse: reverse the selected clips (audio plays backward; MIDI mirrors in time).
• + Audio: add an audio track.
• + MIDI: add a MIDI track.
• Horizontal Zoom: zoom the timeline horizontally.
• Expand All and Collapse All: expand or collapse all track controls.

Paste Sample and Add MIDI Clip remain available from the menus (Cmd+Shift+V and Cmd+Shift+M).

Pasted and imported audio clips display waveform previews in the clip body. When an audio clip is looped by extending it to the right, the waveform preview tiles each repetition so the repeated sections visually match the original looped portion.

You can also drag files from Finder directly into the Arrangement view timeline. Drop a .wav or .mp3 file onto an audio track lane to place it as an audio clip at that timeline position, or drop a .mid/.midi file onto a MIDI track lane to import it as a MIDI clip. Dropping files on the empty region below the tracks creates matching new tracks automatically — audio files land on a fresh audio track, MIDI files on a fresh MIDI track.

Track Lanes

Each track appears as a lane in the timeline.

In Arrangement view, track controls can include:

• Track number
• Track name
• Expand/collapse
• Mute
• Solo
• Volume
• Pan
• Instrument plug-in, for MIDI tracks
• MIDI input/output controls, where available
• Automation controls
• Effects chain

Right-click a track to open its context menu and rename it. You can also right-click a clip to rename that clip from its context menu.

Clicking an empty part of a track lane selects that track, so commands such as paste know which track to use. Clicking empty timeline space clears selected clips and selected tracks. Cmd-click and Shift-click track controls can select multiple tracks; edits to volume, pan, mute, solo, color, name, or send levels apply to the selected group.

Mute and solo are applied as mixer output gates. A muted or unsoloed MIDI track can keep its instrument and effects running internally while its track output is silent, so re-enabling the track does not require the MIDI sequence to restart.

Selected tracks can be copied, cut, pasted, deleted, or dragged as a group to reorder them.

The track color picker offers a standard palette plus a custom color well; custom colors you pick join the palette as swatches and persist across songs, so a hand-picked color can be reused anywhere.

A MIDI track's right-click menu also offers Freeze Track and Convert to Audio Track. Freezing renders the track — instrument and effects included — into a hidden audio file that plays in place of the live chain, dramatically lightening playback for heavy plug-ins; the track's controls stay visible, a badge marks the freeze stale after edits, and you can refreeze or unfreeze at any time. Convert to Audio Track performs the same render but replaces the MIDI track with a permanent audio track.

When track controls are collapsed in Arrangement view, MIDI tracks still show a compact gear button for opening the loaded instrument editor when available.

Volume sliders in Arrangement and Mixer snap to 0.5 dB increments. If a track has volume or pan automation, the matching track-control slider is disabled until that automation lane is deleted.

Selecting Clips

• Click a clip to select it.
• Cmd-click clips to add or remove clips from the selection.
• Select one clip, then Shift-click another clip to select clips in between.
• Drag selected clips to move them together.
• Use Left Arrow and Right Arrow in Arrangement view to nudge selected clips by the current arrangement grid value.
• Drag a rectangular marquee around clips, including clips across multiple tracks, to select them together.
• Press Delete to delete the current selection.
• Press Cmd+D to duplicate the primary selected clip immediately after itself.
• Press Option+Right / Option+Left to add or remove one repetition of each selected clip's pattern — every clip steps by its own pattern length. The same commands appear in the clip's context menu, and Remove Repetition hides on clips with nothing to remove.
• Right-click a clip for more: Replicate... lays any number of copies end to end (with an optional variation rolled per copy on generator-made clips; the dialog remembers your last count and variation choice), Reverse flips the clip's content, Set Color recolors the clip (or every selected clip) from nine swatches computed around the track's hue — the chosen color travels with the clip through duplicates, copies, and slicing — and Merge Clips appears when two or more clips on the same track are selected.
• Press 0 to disable or enable selected clips.
• Press Cmd+V to paste copied clips after the primary selected clip, at the clicked paste destination, or at the playhead if no clip or paste destination is active.
• Moving a MIDI or audio clip onto another compatible clip on the same track merges them instead of leaving them layered.

Disabled clips are grayed out and do not play. When a MIDI clip is re-enabled during playback, future note-on events can play without waiting for a full graph rebuild; latch-style clips resume when their next trigger occurs.

When multiple clips are copied across tracks, pasting preserves their relative timing and track offsets. While looping playback runs, clicking in an arrangement track sets the clicked position on that track as the paste destination without disturbing the playhead; when playback is stopped, clicks position the playhead as usual.

Selecting Empty Time

Drag across an empty area of the arrangement timeline to define a new loop region in the top loop band.

If there is no rectangular time selection, adding a MIDI clip uses the loop region as the target range when possible.

Clip Length and Clip Looping

Clips can have their own looped playback range. Dragging a clip's right edge extends its span: drag past the clip's own length and the content begins to repeat. To change the clip's length itself, hold Option when you start dragging the right edge of a clip that is not yet repeating — the length follows the drag, quantized to the current grid setting, without starting any repetition. Exact lengths can also be typed via the context menu's Resize Clip. After looping is enabled, dragging the right edge adjusts the clip loop length, letting you extend or shrink the repeating region without changing the underlying clip start.

When multiple clips are selected, changing the loop length of one selected clip changes the selected clips together.

The master row stays pinned to the bottom of Arrangement view, so it remains available even when a song has enough tracks to scroll vertically.

Dragging Outside the Visible Area

When dragging clips far left or right, the arrangement can scroll so you can continue moving the clips beyond the currently visible timeline.

Dragging the loop region left or right can also scroll the arrangement when you reach the visible edge.

Use the mouse wheel or trackpad scroll gesture over the Arrangement timeline header or time ruler to zoom horizontally around the pointer. Double-click the loop region header to fit the whole song in the view. Timeline zoom is saved with each song, so every song reopens at the zoom you left it.

Mixer View

Mixer view combines a compact timeline overview with mixer controls.

The top section shows thin track lanes with clip placement, track colors, loop region, and playhead. Use it to see where material exists in the song. You can set the playhead and adjust the loop region from this overview: drag in the header strip above the lanes to define a new loop range, drag the region's edges to resize it or its middle to move it (the timeline autoscrolls when a drag reaches the visible edge), and nudge the loop region with the Left and Right arrow keys while the pointer is over the overview. Dragging across the lanes themselves sweeps out a selection rectangle that selects every clip it crosses — the same marquee as the Arrangement. Clicking a clip in the overview selects it (and its track) so Cmd+L can set the loop region around it, Cmd-click adds or removes clips, and Shift-click selects the range from the anchor through the clicked clip — the same rules as the Arrangement. Clip selection carries over when switching between Arrangement and Mixer, and switching to the Piano Roll, Generator, or Sample Editor opens the clip selected here, just as it would from the Arrangement. Use the mouse wheel or trackpad scroll gesture over the overview to zoom horizontally around the pointer. The overview is not meant for rearranging clips: there are no clip context menus or editing keys in the Mixer.

The lower section shows track controls and compact responsive meters. Use it to monitor levels, mute and solo tracks, and adjust volume and pan. Hovering a volume or pan slider arms the arrow keys — Left/Right for fine adjustments, Up/Down for larger steps — with no click needed. The track name sidebar sizes itself to the longest track name whenever the Mixer becomes active. The meter section scrolls horizontally when there are more tracks than fit onscreen, and selecting a track scrolls its bottom control into view when needed.

Mixer track controls are compact, and the master strip uses the same control width as regular tracks. Track numbers appear before track names in both Arrangement and Mixer.

When the mixer controls are wider than the window, the master strip stays pinned at the far right while the track strips scroll underneath it.

Click a mixer track to select it, Cmd-click to add or remove individual tracks, or Shift-click to select a range. Edits to volume, pan, mute, and solo apply to the selected mixer tracks. Empty mixer space clears the track selection.

Mixer track controls show the current instrument and effects with gear buttons for opening plug-in windows, but choosing instruments and editing effect chains is done from Arrangement view.

Mixer view has its own horizontal zoom slider and supports the same horizontal zoom shortcuts as other timeline views. The loop-region shading updates while you drag the loop region, and timeline bar markers continue to render at readable intervals when the mixer is zoomed far out.

Piano Roll View

Piano Roll view edits notes in the selected MIDI clip.

Use Piano Roll to:

• Add notes.
• Select notes.
• Move selected notes.
• Resize notes.
• Adjust note velocity.
• Quantize or unquantize notes.
• Slice selected notes to the current note length.
• Merge selected notes (one glued note per pitch).
• Split selected notes at the playhead.
• Reverse selected notes, or the full MIDI sequence if no notes are selected.
• Select all notes in the selected clip.
• Set the MIDI clip length in beats.
• Copy MIDI to the clipboard, when the app is registered.

The toolbar includes separate Timing and Length button groups running from 1/64 through 1, 2, and 4 bars. Timing controls note placement and quantize timing; Length controls created note duration, resize-drag snapping, and quantize/unquantize length. The clip length is typed directly in beats — or nudged with the arrow keys while hovering the Beats field (Left/Right ±1, Up/Down ±4).

To adjust an individual note's duration directly, drag the right edge of the note — the drag snaps the duration to multiples of the current Length setting, measured from the note's own start. For exact values, double-click a note (or press Return/Enter with notes selected) to open the Note Details dialog: type the start (from the beginning of the clip) and length in beats or whole notes — as whole numbers, decimals (2.5), or fractions (1 1/4) — plus the note's velocity (1–127) and probability (percent chance the note plays). With several notes selected, a field whose values differ across the selection comes up blank — leave it blank to change nothing, or type a value to set it on every selected note; the typed start still moves the selection together, anchored on the earliest selected note.

Piano Roll note entry follows the current key and scale: Magister Music does not create new notes outside the selected scale.

The velocity-lane button (next to the ghost-notes button) shows an editable velocity lane pinned below the note grid: each note appears as a bar, drag a bar to set its velocity, or use the scroll wheel over a bar to nudge it. Notes sounding together are staggered slightly so every bar stays visible, and selected notes' bars are highlighted.

A neighboring button switches the lane to probability mode: each note's bar shows the chance it plays on any given pass (100% unless you lower it). Drag or scroll a bar to set it — playback rolls independently for every note on every loop pass, and exports draw their own rolls the same way, so repeats vary just like live passes. Editing a bar applies to every selected note when the note is part of a selection. Probability also shows in the note grid itself: certain notes draw fully opaque while chance notes grow increasingly translucent, so a pattern's dice are visible at a glance.

The Chord menu stamps diatonic chords: pick a shape (triad, seventh, and more) and each click enters the full chord built on the clicked scale degree, following the current key and scale. Set it back to none for single-note entry.

Legato removes the gaps between the notes being operated on — the selection, or the whole clip when nothing is selected: each note in the scope extends to the next scoped note's start (any pitch), and the scope's last note runs to the clip's end. Notes outside the selection neither move nor act as boundaries, so selecting two notes of a pitch chains them across other voices in between. Merge Notes, next to the scissors, is the inverse of slicing: each pitch's selected notes become one note spanning from the first's start to the last's end, gaps included.

The Swing menu sets a swing amount that Quantize applies: offbeats land late by the chosen percentage. The status line reports whether the swing touched any offbeats, so you know when a pattern had none to move.

Clicking an in-scale pitch row adds a note when no note is under the pointer — even while other notes are selected, so a phrase can grow without re-selecting. Clicking an out-of-scale pitch row deselects selected notes, or moves the playhead if no notes are selected; Esc also deselects everything (remappable). Clicking inside an already-selected note moves the playhead to the exact clicked position while playback is stopped — the selection survives, making it a natural way to set a split point before Split Notes at Playhead. Cmd-click toggles individual note selection, and Shift-click adds only notes that intersect the vertical line between the existing selection and the clicked note. Selected notes move, resize, and right-click-delete together, and vertical movement snaps notes to the closest pitch in the current scale. Holding the right mouse button and dragging sweeps an eraser: every note the pointer crosses is deleted, one gesture for clearing a run of notes.

Useful Piano Roll shortcuts:

• Arrow keys: nudge selected notes.
• Shift+Up: move selected notes up one octave.
• Shift+Down: move selected notes down one octave.
• Cmd+U: quantize selected MIDI notes.
• Cmd+A: select all MIDI notes in the selected clip when Piano Roll view is active.
• Cmd+D: duplicate the selected notes one selection-span to the right — the copies become the selection, so repeated presses walk the phrase along the clip.
• Option+Right / Option+Left: lengthen or shorten every selected note by one toolbar Length unit.
• Delete: delete selected notes.

The loop-region length-nudge shortcuts (assignable in Preferences > Shortcuts) also gain a Piano Roll meaning: with notes selected they shift each note left or right by its own length, sliding it into the adjacent back-to-back slot.

Sample Editor View

The Sample Editor shows the full source recording of the selected audio clip as a zoomable waveform, with the part the clip actually plays highlighted as a bright window over the dimmed source. Double-click an audio clip (or use its context menu's Open in Sample Editor) to jump straight there. A sliced clip opens at its own sound — the view starts where the slice's audio starts, not at the head of the original file. All edits are non-destructive clip parameters; the audio file on disk is never modified.

• Play: the Play button in the header auditions the edited clip from its own start, wherever the song playhead is, with gain, fades, reverse, pitch, and stretch applied — it stops itself at the end of the clip. Return (or keypad Enter) toggles it while the Sample Editor is open.
• Trim: drag the window's left edge to trim the head of the clip (the remaining audio keeps its position in the song; on a looping clip the trim slips which part of the source feeds the loop). Drag the right edge to trim the tail of a non-looping clip. With Snap enabled, trims land on the arrangement grid; with it off, trims land on the nearest zero crossing so cuts stay click-free.
• Slip: hold Option and drag in the waveform to slide the playing window across the source without moving the clip on the timeline — the window previews live and commits when you release.
• Fades: drag the small circular handles at the top corners of the window to set fade-in and fade-out lengths, and click a handle to choose the ramp shape — linear, S-curve, exponential, or logarithmic. The fade ramps are drawn on the waveform. Fades are available on any clip that plays its source at most once through, including slices; a clip that actually repeats its source hides them, because a baked fade would repeat with every cycle.
• Gain: the Gain slider in the header sets clip gain in dB and scales the drawn waveform. The Normalize button beside it sets the gain so the loudest played sample peaks at -1 dBFS.
• Pitch: the Pitch stepper shifts the clip up or down by semitones (up to two octaves each way) without changing its timing, non-destructively — set it back to 0 to restore the original pitch.
• Invert: the Invert button flips the clip's polarity (every sample multiplied by -1), non-destructively — inaudible on its own, decisive when layered samples cancel each other. Highlighted while active.
• Select a region: click in the waveform to place the playhead, or drag across it to select a time range (snapping follows the Snap toggle). Press Delete to silence the selected range — the clip splits around it and the middle is removed, leaving a gap — or right-click and choose Ripple Delete Selection to remove the range and slide the later material left.
• Reverse: the arrows button plays the clip's audio backward, non-destructively; click again to restore. The drawn waveform mirrors to match. The same reversal is available from the clip's context menu and the Arrangement header's reverse button (which also reverses MIDI clips).
• Takes: when a clip holds multiple recorded takes, a strip above the waveform switches between them and offers Delete Take and Keep Only This.
• Navigation: the top ruler shows song bars, the bottom ruler shows time; the magnifier slider (or the horizontal zoom shortcuts) zooms from fit-to-view up to 64x. Deep zooms read the source audio itself, so waveform detail keeps increasing all the way to individual samples. The playhead follows playback through the clip's window, wrapping on loops.

Because looping audio clips repeat their source, double-clicking an audio clip now opens the Sample Editor; toggling looping moved to the clip's context menu (Loop / Disable Loop).

Generator View

Generator view works with the selected MIDI clip and is aimed at rapidly creating, exploring, and reshaping musical ideas. It is not just a random-note tool; it is a statistical pattern generator that uses the parameters you choose to produce chord shapes, melodic movement, rhythmic spacing, rests, note lengths, velocities, and timing feel.

Two half-locked regenerate buttons refine a result you partly like: New Rhythm keeps the current pitches in order and generates fresh timing; New Pitches keeps the rhythm exactly and takes fresh pitches. Save and Revert bracket experiments.

The intended workflow is iterative. Start with a selected MIDI clip, choose broad settings such as model, pattern type, and sequence length, then refine the result with the colored parameter controls. You can quickly regenerate ideas, save a result you like, revert if a later change is not useful, and copy the generated MIDI for use elsewhere.

The colored controls at the bottom shape the statistical behavior of the generator. They let you guide the output toward certain pitch ranges, note lengths, rests, and other musical tendencies without manually placing every note. This makes Generator view useful for sketching parts, finding unexpected chord or melody patterns, and building variations around a musical direction.

The Model setting controls the character of the generated patterns. The best choice is often a matter of experimentation and personal taste: some models tend to favor repetition, while others may lean toward ascending motion, wider variation, or different rhythmic shapes.

Generator controls include:

• Presets: save, load, and delete generator presets.
• Model: choose the generator model.
• Bars: set generated sequence length.
• Pattern: choose the pattern style.
• Save: store the current generated sequence for later revert.
• Revert: restore the saved generated sequence.
• Copy MIDI: copy the generated MIDI sequence, when the app is registered.
• Temperature: control variation in generated output.
• Velocity Variance: vary note velocities.
• Timing Variance: vary generated note timing and note lengths.
• Horizontal Zoom: zoom the generator timeline horizontally.

The Follow menu points the Generator at another MIDI clip as a chord guide: at each moment, generated notes use only the pitch classes sounding in the follow clip (in any octave — the octave controls still place them), so writing a chord progression into a clip makes every generate and regenerate play the changes. Rests in the follow clip hold the most recent chord, and material before its first note is unconstrained. The follow clip's length must match the generator length; the menu lists every MIDI clip with its length and disables mismatches. A disabled (muted-out) clip works as a silent guide, and deleting or resizing the follow clip simply clears the selection on the next generate. The follow choice is saved with the clip but never with generator presets.

Choosing a pattern or changing Temperature does not regenerate by itself. Timing Variance affects only newly generated or regenerated notes. Regeneration happens when you use the generate command, click or right-click a section of the generator grid, or use the mouse wheel over a section. As a shortcut, using the mouse wheel over a generator section regenerates only that section.

The mouse wheel can also adjust the height of the colored probability bars at the bottom of Generator view. Right-clicking a bottom probability bar sets it to zero, and double-clicking a bar sets it to full. If all octave, pitch, chord size, or note length bars are zero, generate/regenerate does nothing. New generator clips default the 1/8 note length bar to full.

Generator settings are stored with MIDI clips. Duplicated and pasted MIDI clips keep their generator settings, and merged MIDI clips preserve compatible generator settings when possible.

Right-clicking a generated clip in the Arrangement offers instant variations without opening the Generator: Near Variation re-rolls one dimension (new pitches over the same rhythm, or a new rhythm over the same pitches), Variation regenerates the clip under a different random model, and Distant Variation additionally shakes up the pattern, temperature, and variance settings. Probability bars are always kept as drawn, the changed settings are written back to the clip so the Generator shows what produced the result, every selected generated clip varies when several are selected, and a single undo restores them all.

Generate from Preset on the clip context menu runs the generator on any MIDI clip using one of your saved presets — the quickest way to turn a hand-made or empty clip into a generated one — and Generate from Random Preset rolls a different preset independently for every clip in a multi-selection. The app ships with a factory collection of generator presets; Preferences > Interface offers Clear Generator Presets and Reset Generator Preset Defaults to wipe or restore them.

Clips remember whether the generator made them: double-clicking a generator-made clip opens the Generator, while hand-drawn and recorded clips open the Piano Roll — and hand-editing a generated clip's notes in the Piano Roll hands it back to the Piano Roll. The variation menu items appear only on generator-made clips. Generator runs also name their clip with the lowest unique number (unnamed clips become 1, 2, ...; numbered names keep their prefix), and regenerating a looped clip always keeps its pattern length and repetition structure.

Tracks, Instruments, and Effects

Instruments

MIDI tracks can host Audio Unit instrument plug-ins. The picker lists your own enabled plug-ins first and the built-in instruments after them. When you add an instrument, the plug-in window opens so you can configure it immediately.

Switching a track's instrument during playback swaps just that track: everything else keeps playing uninterrupted, and the track rejoins in sync as soon as the new instrument has loaded.

Instrument selection is edited from Arrangement track controls. Mixer track controls show the current instrument name and gear button but do not offer the instrument picker.

Hyperion (Built-In Instrument)

Hyperion is the app's built-in polyphonic subtractive synthesizer. It appears first in the instrument picker out of the box, needs nothing enabled in Preferences, and its settings save inside the song — a project that uses it opens and sounds identical on any machine. When no plug-ins are enabled in Preferences, new MIDI tracks pick it automatically so the app makes sound out of the box.

The voice architecture: two oscillators (sine, triangle, saw, and pulse with adjustable width) with per-oscillator octave, fine detune, and a mix control, plus a noise source; a resonant filter (low-pass, high-pass, or band-pass) with keyboard tracking and its own envelope; separate ADSR envelopes for amplitude and filter; an LFO assignable to pitch, cutoff, or amplitude; glide with a mono-legato mode; velocity sensitivity; a stereo Width control that spreads the two oscillators across the field; and 16-voice polyphony with a musical soft-saturation output stage. The sustain pedal (CC 64) holds released notes until the pedal lifts.

A built-in effects stage rounds out the sound: a chorus for motion and width, a ping-pong stereo delay with time, feedback, and mix, and a room-to-hall reverb whose Size controls the decay. Factory presets carry tasteful effect sends per role, and every effect fully bypasses at zero mix.

The editor opens like any plug-in window. Drag a knob vertically to adjust (hold Option for fine control), double-click a knob to reset it, and hover to read its exact value — while hovering, the arrow keys (Left/Right fine, Up/Down coarse) and the scroll wheel adjust it too. The Presets menu offers 146 hand-curated factory sounds grouped by role — Bass, Lead, Pad, Keys, and Pluck — plus Init to start from scratch; the arrow buttons beside it step to the previous or next preset through the whole bank, the dice button jumps to a random patch, and the heart button marks favorites, which show a heart in the menu and are remembered across sessions. Every knob is a plug-in parameter, so automation lanes, LFOs, and Macros can target the synth like any other instrument.

Morpheus (Built-In FM Synthesizer)

Morpheus is the second built-in instrument: a four-operator FM synthesizer in the classic phase-modulation tradition, tuned for the sounds subtractive synthesis struggles with — glassy electric pianos, bells and mallets, metallic basses, plucky digital keys, and evolving pads. Like Hyperion it sits at the top of the instrument picker with no setup, saves its settings inside the song, and every knob is automatable.

The voice: four sine operators, each with a frequency Ratio (×0.25 to ×16 of the played note — integer ratios sound harmonic, offset ratios go bell-like and metallic), fine Detune in cents, an output Level, and its own full ADSR envelope. Eight algorithms route the operators — from a deep four-in-a-row serial stack through parallel pairs and branching splits to pure four-voice additive — and the panel shows each algorithm's signal path under its button and badges every operator section as CARRIER or MOD for the current choice, so you always know which envelopes shape loudness and which shape tone. A modulator's envelope is Morpheus's brightness control: fast modulator decay over a slower carrier is the classic FM pluck. Operator 4 can feed back into itself for buzz and edge. After the operators: a global tone low-pass with resonance, an LFO assignable to vibrato, tremolo, or brightness, glide with mono-legato, velocity sensitivity, 16 voices, sustain-pedal support, and the same effects stage as Hyperion — chorus, ping-pong delay, and reverb.

The editor works like Hyperion's — vertical drag (Option for fine), double-click to reset, hover to read values — and adds the keyboard layer from the effect panels: hover a knob and the arrow keys nudge it (Left/Right fine, Up/Down coarse); with no knob hovered, Left/Right step through the presets. The preset cluster offers 91 hand-curated factory sounds in five categories — Keys, Bass, Lead, Pad, and Pluck — with previous/next arrows, and the dice button jumps to a random patch (never the one you're on) when you want to be surprised. The heart button marks the current preset as a favorite — favorites show a heart in the Presets menu, and the picks are remembered across sessions.

Vulcan (Built-In Ensemble Synthesizer)

Vulcan is the third built-in instrument: a unison/ensemble synthesizer in the supersaw tradition — the wall-of-sound engine behind trance and big-room pads, plucks, rolling basses, and stabs. Each voice stacks up to seven detuned copies of a saw or square oscillator, spread across the stereo field; Detune sets how far the stack spreads (subtle chorus to wild), Blend fades the outer oscillators in against the center, Width pans them apart, and a centered sine sub an octave down keeps the low end mono and solid however wide the top gets. Unison start phases are randomized on every note, so attacks stay lush instead of buzzing.

After the stack: a resonant filter (low-pass, high-pass, or band-pass) with key tracking and a bipolar envelope amount (negative amounts sweep downward), separate ADSR envelopes for amplitude and filter, and an LFO with four shapes — sine, triangle, square, and sample-and-hold — targeting pitch, cutoff, or amplitude. Square-on-amplitude is the classic trance gate. Glide with mono-legato, velocity sensitivity, 12-voice polyphony, sustain-pedal support, and the familiar chorus, ping-pong delay, and reverb stage complete the voice.

The editor works exactly like its siblings — vertical drag (Option for fine), double-click to reset, hover to read values, arrow-key or scroll-wheel nudging on the hovered knob — and the preset cluster has previous/next arrows, the dice button, and heart marking with favorites remembered across sessions. Vulcan carries 145 hand-curated presets across Pad, Pluck, Lead, Bass, and Stab.

Chronos (Built-In String Synthesizer)

Chronos is the fourth built-in instrument: plucked-string physical modeling in the Karplus-Strong tradition. Instead of oscillators, each note fires an excitation into two slightly detuned string models — tuned feedback delay lines with a damping filter in the loop — so what you hear is the actual behavior of a vibrating string: the attack chirp, the harmonic bloom, the natural decay. The Exciter switch chooses a pick (comb-filtered noise burst — Hardness sets its bite, Position moves the virtual pick along the string) or a mallet (a soft thump for marimbas, kalimbas, and vibes). Detune and Spread set how far the two strings drift and pan apart; Body mixes in a resonant instrument-body model whose Size moves it from parlor to dreadnought.

The string envelope is physical rather than ADSR: Brightness sets how fast high harmonics damp (felted to ringing steel), Decay how long the string sustains (a fifteen-second maximum turns plucks into drones), Release how quickly a lifted finger mutes it, and a short Attack softens the pick transient. Velocity drives both loudness and excitation brightness — play softly and the pick softens too. A vibrato/tremolo LFO, a master tone filter, 16 voices, sustain-pedal support, and the familiar chorus, ping-pong delay, and reverb stage complete it. The editor matches its siblings exactly — drag, double-click, hover, arrow-key and scroll-wheel nudging — with the preset cluster's arrows, dice, and heart marking. Chronos launches with 55 presets across Strings, Harp, Mallet, Muted, and Hybrid.

Polaris (Built-In Wavetable Synthesizer)

Polaris is the fifth built-in instrument: a wavetable morphing synthesizer in the modern workstation tradition. Each of its two oscillators plays one of ten wavetables — from classic analog morphs, PWM, and saw stacks through vowels, growls, glass, hollow combs, digital sparkle, breath, and sync sweeps — and the Position knob scans through the table's frames, morphing the timbre continuously. Every table is generated band-limited per octave, so even the brightest tables stay clean at the top of the keyboard. The Motion section is the heart of the instrument: a position envelope (attack/decay, bipolar per-oscillator amounts) and a position LFO sweep the wavetables while a note sustains — snap the envelope for modern plucks, push a growl table for moving basses, or drift a vowel table for evolving pads. Each oscillator also has coarse tuning for octave and interval stacks.

The engine around the oscillators matches its siblings: up to seven-voice unison per oscillator with detune, blend, and stereo width (power-normalized, randomized phases), a centered sub oscillator and noise, a resonant multi-mode filter (LP/HP/BP) with bipolar envelope and key tracking, dual ADSR envelopes, a global LFO in four shapes targeting pitch, cutoff, or amplitude, and glide with mono-legato. The Gloss knob is Polaris's finishing move — an OTT-style three-band compressor that pushes quiet detail up and loud peaks down for the polished, glossy sheen of modern productions — followed by the familiar chorus, ping-pong delay, and reverb. The editor matches its siblings — drag, double-click, hover, arrow-key and scroll-wheel nudging, and the preset cluster's arrows, dice, and heart marking. Polaris ships with 130 hand-curated presets across Pad, Pluck, Lead, Bass, and Keys.

Lumina (Built-In Hybrid Synthesizer)

Lumina is the sixth built-in instrument: a character-analog subtractive hybrid. Two band-limited virtual-analog oscillators misbehave on purpose — per-voice pitch drift and envelope slop give every note the small instabilities of vintage hardware — and feed a Hybrid stage offering hard sync, ring modulation, cross-modulation, or a west-coast wavefolder, ahead of the instrument's centerpiece: a tanh-driven four-pole ladder filter that thins, sings, and self-oscillates like the originals. The editor matches its siblings — drag, double-click, hover, arrow-key and scroll-wheel nudging — with the full preset cluster and 58 hand-curated factory presets.

Apollo (Built-In Drum Machine)

Apollo is the built-in drum machine: a sample-based kit player, a step-sequencer pattern editor, and a role-aware pattern generator in one panel. Like its synthesizer siblings it sits in the instrument picker with no setup, saves everything inside the song, and exposes its mixer controls for automation.

Slots and Kits

Apollo has eleven slots. Eight are semantic — Kick, Snare, Clap, Closed Hat, Open Hat, Tom, Perc, and Cymbal — which is what lets the generator write musically for each of them. Three more, Oth1 through Oth3, are free lanes for anything else: a vocal chop, a riser, an extra shaker. The generator never writes the Other lanes (or clears them), so what you draw there survives every re-roll; they have no lock or density controls because they need none.

Each slot holds a one-shot sample. The factory kits — Apollo 808, Apollo 909, and Apollo Mixed — use synthesized drums generated inside the app, so factory songs carry no sample files and open identically anywhere. Assign your own samples from the slot's menu: Choose File..., Paste (a file or raw audio data on the clipboard), a Factory drum, or a User sample — or just drag an audio file from Finder onto the slot row. Imported samples are normalized to the app's standard format and stored in an app-wide Apollo library, so a kick you import once is available in every song from the User submenu; the Delete submenu removes library samples you no longer want (saved songs are unaffected — each song package carries its own copy of the samples it uses, which is also what keeps projects portable across machines).

Every slot has level, pan, and tune (±24 semitones) sliders — all automatable plug-in parameters — plus mute and solo, a velocity sensitivity control (how strongly the pattern's velocities shape the hit), and a choke group: slots sharing a group cut each other off, and the closed hat chokes the open hat out of the box, as real hats do. Each slot row carries its own identity color across its name, sliders, and grid lane.

A kit — the slot samples plus their level/pan/tune voicing and the master Volume — saves and recalls through the kit preset cluster in the panel header, with the standard arrows, menu, dice, heart favorites, and save button. The kit preset name survives slot tweaks, exactly like a synth preset survives knob tweaks; saving from a factory kit suggests a "Mod" name, and saving while on one of your own kits updates it silently.

The Pattern Editor

The grid works like a hardware step sequencer, one row per slot. Left-click adds a hit, right-click removes it — and holding the right button sweeps an eraser, removing every hit the pointer crosses. Velocity draws as opacity and can be shaped three ways: drag a hit vertically, scroll the wheel over it, or hover it and use the arrow keys — Left/Right for fine steps, Up/Down for coarse, the same gesture language as every knob in the app. Newly painted hits take the last velocity you set.

The resolution menu spans 1/8 through 1/32 including triplet grids, and patterns run 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 bars — changing resolution keeps hits on their musical positions where the new grid can express them. Swing pushes offbeat steps late. Two humanize sliders loosen the machine: Jitter lets every hit land slightly off the grid, and Vel Var varies hit levels — both roll fresh dice on every pass, so no two bars are identical, live or exported. Right-click a slot's name for fill actions — every beat, every half beat, every step, or euclidean spreads — and Clear Row.

While the pattern plays — during playback, or auditioning with a held note — a playhead line sweeps the grid in the playhead color from Preferences, moving at the display's full refresh rate, and the step under it lights up as it fires. The playhead appears when the playing pattern is the one on screen, so editing the verse while the fill plays leaves the verse grid still.

Patterns are triggered from ordinary MIDI clips: while any note is held, the pattern plays locked to the song's beat grid, exactly as if it had been running since bar 1 — a note that starts mid-bar picks the pattern up in progress, so drums always land on the grid however clips are placed. Use the + chip to add patterns (each starts as a copy of the current one) and assign each to a MIDI pitch from the menu beside the chips: notes at that pitch play that pattern — a verse groove on C1, the fill on D1 — while unassigned pitches play the pattern currently selected for editing.

Generation

The Generate section rolls new patterns with knowledge of what each slot means. Choose one of fifteen styles — Four on the Floor, House, Techno, Disco, Breakbeat, Drum & Bass, UK Garage, Boom Bap, Trap, Drill, Dubstep, Halftime, Funk, Reggaeton, or Rock — shape each slot's density with the slider in its row, and lock rows you want to keep (the padlock): Generate re-rolls only the unlocked semantic rows, so you can keep the kick and snare while auditioning hat patterns all day. Generate replaces the steps, not the feel — your swing, Jitter, and Vel Var settings carry through every roll.

Pattern Presets

The pattern preset cluster in the header holds twenty-five factory patterns: the fifteen style patterns, plus ten characterful variants — Deep House, Peak Techno, Minimal, French Disco, Amen Style, Liquid DnB, Lo-Fi Hip Hop, Rolling Trap, Big Room, and Backbeat Rock. Applying a preset replaces the current pattern's steps at its current length, and points the Generate section at the preset's parent style so re-rolls continue in the same character. Your own patterns save through the cluster's save button — with the grid, swing, and humanize settings included — and appear in the User section, cycling with the arrows and dice like any factory preset.

The Panel

The panel is horizontally resizable: drag its right edge and the window follows, with extra width going to the pattern grid; the width is remembered across sessions. Long sample names abbreviate in the slot rows — hover one to read the full name.

Plug-ins can be organized into named groups in Preferences > Audio Units: create a group, then assign plug-ins to it. Grouped plug-ins appear inside matching submenus in the instrument and effect pickers, keeping long plug-in lists navigable; ungrouped plug-ins stay at the top level.

Effects

Tracks and the master channel can host effect plug-ins. In Arrangement view, effects can be added, opened, bypassed, copied, pasted, reordered, and removed from track controls. The Add menu lists your own enabled plug-ins first, then the built-in audio effects, with the built-in MIDI effects at the bottom.

Editing a track's effect chain during playback — adding, removing, reordering, or bypassing — no longer stops the song: the track's chain is swapped in place while everything else keeps playing. Master and bus chain edits still restart playback from the current position.

The Add menu also offers a full rack of built-in audio effects. The EQ is an eight-band parametric equalizer with an interactive frequency-response editor: drag band nodes directly on the curve (vertical drag sets gain — or Q on pass/notch bands and with Option held — and the scroll wheel shapes Q), double-click a node to bypass its band, and right-click one to switch its type between Bell, Low Shelf, High Shelf, High Pass, Low Pass, and Notch. The pass filters offer cut slopes of 12, 24, 36, 48, 72, or 96 dB per octave (pick one in the band strip or the node's right-click menu) — steeper slopes cascade Butterworth stages, so the passband stays flat while the cut walls off. A real-time spectrum analyzer of the EQ's output draws behind the curve (toggleable), the selected band's exact frequency, gain, and Q are editable in the strip below, and every band parameter plus the output trim is automatable — frequency lanes sweep logarithmically, and the editor animates as lanes play. The Compressor is a full-featured dynamics compressor with threshold, ratio, knee, attack, release, and makeup gain, a gain-reduction meter, and sidechain keying — choose any other MIDI or audio track as the key source to duck against it. The Limiter is its brickwall sibling with input gain, ceiling, and release. The Multiband splits the signal into three bands at two crossovers you can drag right on its display (Linkwitz-Riley filters, so the split sums perfectly flat) and compresses each band independently — per-band threshold, ratio, attack, release, makeup, bypass, and solo, with live gain-reduction bars over the spectrum analyzer. Any band can key on the matching frequency range of a sidechain track instead of itself: pick the kick as the sidechain source, mark the low band Ext Key, and only your lows duck when the kick hits. Band parameters and both crossover frequencies are automatable. The Reverb is an algorithmic room on a modulated feedback delay network: pre-delay, size, decay (0.2–20 s), damping, low/high cut on the tail, modulation, early/late balance, width, and mix, with a Freeze toggle that rings the tail forever and twenty-five factory presets — from Ambience, Room, Plate, Hall, Cathedral, and Shimmer Bed through creative spaces — that shape the space without touching your mix setting. A live spectrum of the reverb's output draws in the panel. The Saturator adds harmonic color with three characters — Tape (smooth, odd harmonics), Tube (warm, even harmonics), and Hard (outright clipping) — plus Drive, a parallel Mix control, an Output trim, and an Auto Gain switch that holds loudness steady while Drive shapes the tone. Nine more round out the rack: the Delay is a clean tempo-syncable delay (note divisions from 1/1 to 1/32 with dotted and triplet values, or free milliseconds) with ping-pong routing, low/high cut in the feedback loop, and a stereo time offset; the Echo is its tape-flavored sibling with wobble, loop drive and damping, and a Ducking control that holds the echoes back while the source plays and lets them bloom in the gaps; the Chorus stacks up to four modulated voices; the Doubler layers two or four constant micro-detuned copies under the untouched dry signal (real pitch shift, not vibrato — clean synth doubling without the vocal-warble artifacts), with slow humanizing drift, stereo width, and a doubles-only low cut; the Flanger sweeps a short comb with bipolar feedback; the Phaser runs 4 to 12 allpass stages with feedback; the Tremolo chops or auto-pans in four wave shapes with tempo sync; the Auto Filter is a resonant state-variable filter (LP/HP/BP/notch, 12 or 24 dB/oct) driven by a syncable LFO in four shapes (including sample-and-hold) and an input envelope follower for touch-wah; the Distortion offers five transfer curves from soft overdrive to wavefolding with bias for even harmonics, a tone control, and auto gain; and the Bitcrusher quantizes to fractional bit depths and holds samples for lo-fi crunch. Seven more arrived in 1.7.0: the Volume Shaper applies a tempo-synced pump/duck gain curve (depth, hold, rise, curve) whose phase locks to the song's beat grid during playback — dips land on the division, realigning at loops and tempo changes — for sidechain feel without routing; OTT is a three-band upward+downward compressor in the modern electronic style, with overall depth, a time scale, and per-band trims; the Gate offers classic threshold gating with attack, hold, release, and a range floor, plus a beat-locked rhythmic mode that opens on a note division for a set duty — a trance gate for any audio; the Transient Shaper raises or softens onsets and bodies independently via level-independent envelope comparison; the De-Esser compresses only the band above its frequency with a Listen solo for dialing in; the Stereo Imager scales mid/side width in three bands with adjustable crossovers; and the Utility packs gain trim, equal-power pan, width, polarity invert, and mono fold into one glue tool. All of them are saved with the song, work on tracks, buses, and the master, support Space for play/pause while their window is focused, allow arrow-key nudging of a hovered slider (Left/Right fine, Up/Down coarse) and scroll-wheel adjustment over any hovered control, and expose their continuous parameters for automation — the panel sliders animate while automation plays.

Every built-in effect panel carries the same preset cluster as the built-in synthesizers: previous/next arrows step the factory presets, the preset name opens the full menu, the dice picks one at random, the heart marks favorites (persisted per effect), and the heart-circle toggle restricts the arrows and dice to your favorites. Factory banks cover all sixteen effects, including EQ curves (Vocal Presence, Kick Punch, De-Harsh, Telephone…), compressor and limiter setups (Gentle Glue, Vocal Level, Loud Master…), multiband treatments (Master Glue, Tight Low End, EDM Pump…), and saturation flavors (Tape Warmth, Tube Color, Parallel Heat…). Presets voice the sound and leave your routing alone — sidechain sources and analyzer preferences survive a preset change. The cluster's save button captures your own presets too: the first save of a modified preset asks for a name (suggesting "<preset> Mod"), and subsequent saves of a user preset update it silently. User presets live in a "User" section of each preset menu and cycle with the arrows and dice like any factory preset.

When a MIDI track carries built-in MIDI effects, the hammer button in the Effects header bakes them into the notes: every clip takes the chain's output and the MIDI effect slots are removed — an ordinary undoable edit, useful before fine-tuning individual notes.

The automation sidebar's copy and paste buttons transfer a lane's shape between any parameters: copy a volume lane on one track, select any lane on another (a send, a plugin parameter), and paste — values are normalized, so the shape carries over; points land at the playhead.

MIDI tracks can also host the built-in MIDI effects (Arpeggiator, Chord, Transpose, Scale, Strum, Ratchet, Euclid, Note Echo, Swing, Humanize, Chance, Length, Velocity, and Mirror) from the same Add menu. They transform the track's notes non-destructively, in chain order, before the instrument — the piano roll keeps showing the original notes. Transpose shifts every note by a set number of semitones with no scale snapping; use the Scale effect instead when the result should stay in key.

You can copy an effect plug-in from one track and paste it into another track.

An entire effects chain can be saved as a named preset from the bookmark menu in the Effects header, including each plug-in's full settings. Presets are stored with the app — not the song — so a chain saved in one song can be applied in any other. Applying a preset can replace the current chain or append to it, and works for both tracks and the master channel. Effects in a preset that reference plug-ins not currently enabled are skipped with a message. Saving with an existing preset name replaces that preset, and presets can be deleted from the same menu.

When you add an effect, the plug-in window opens automatically.

In Mixer view, effects are displayed by name with gear buttons for opening their plug-in windows, but bypass, copy/paste, reorder, and delete controls are hidden.

Plug-in Windows

Use Studio > Toggle Plug-in Windows or Cmd+Option+P to close and reopen the set of plug-in windows you currently have open. Built-in effect and MIDI effect panels count too: they float above the main window like Audio Unit editors and join the toggle set.

If you manually close a plug-in window, that plug-in is removed from the remembered set for the toggle command.

While a plug-in window is focused, pressing Space controls app playback.

Plug-in editor windows automatically match the size of the plug-in's interface. Plug-ins that support resizing offer their own control for it — typically a grip in the lower-right corner of their interface or a zoom/size setting in their own menus — and the window follows whatever size the plug-in chooses.

Buses and Sends

Buses are shared effect channels. A track can send part of its signal to a bus — for example one reverb on a bus, fed by several tracks at different levels — and the bus mixes into the master.

• Add a bus with the + Bus button above the track controls in Arrangement view, next to the collapse-all control. Bus strips appear in the Mixer between the track strips and the master strip.
• Bus strips appear in both views: pinned above the master strip in the Arrangement control column (collapsible, like the master strip), and between the track strips and master in the Mixer. A bus strip has a name, fader, mute, and its own effects chain. Like track effects, the chain is edited in Arrangement — the Mixer lists bus effects with gear buttons for opening their windows. Effect chain presets work on buses too.
• Right-click a bus strip to rename or delete it. Deleting a bus removes its sends from all tracks.
• Sends live in the track's Effects / Sends section in the Arrangement track controls. Use the Add menu and choose Send to <bus> to create a send — tracks have no sends until you add one. Each added send shows a row with a level slider, a percentage readout, and a remove button.
• Sends are post-fader, post-effects, and post-mute: a muted track sends nothing, and soloing a track keeps its bus effects audible.
• Bus strips show a stereo meter, and the Arrangement bus strip has automation controls: touch a control in a bus effect's editor to add it to the automation menu, then edit points in the automation lane below the bus row — the same workflow as track and master effect automation. Bus fader and send-level automation are not available yet.
• Buses are saved with the song and included in exports.

Modulators

A modulator is a strip that produces one moving value and drives any number of parameters with it. An LFO computes the value from a waveform locked to the song timeline; a Macro takes it from a slider you move yourself. Modulator strips sit beside the buses — added from the + LFO menu next to + Bus in the Arrangement sidebar header — and appear in both the Arrangement (pinned above the master, with the LFO's actual output curve drawn across the timeline) and the Mixer.

• LFO controls: waveform (sine, triangle, saw up/down, square, and a stepped random that repeats identically on every play and export), rate (tempo-synced divisions from 16 bars to 1/16 including dotted and triplet, or a free Hz rate), phase, and a global depth. A small indicator dot rides the output while playing.
• Targets: click + in the strip's Targets list to map any track's Volume or Pan, or any plug-in parameter you have touched in its editor (the same learned-parameters rule as automation). Each mapping has its own Min–Max range in the parameter's units; Min above Max inverts the sweep, and depth scales every sweep at once.
• One modulator per parameter: mapping a parameter a second modulator already drives moves it. A parameter whose own automation lane has points is owned by the automation — the mapping shows an automated badge and the modulator leaves it alone.
• Mappings to removed plug-ins show missing and stay saved; deleting a track, bus, or effect slot cleans its mappings up. Frozen tracks are left alone until unfrozen.
• Macro automation lives directly on the strip's timeline lane: click the lane to add a snapped point (click the same beat again to remove it), drag points, right-click to delete. New and dragged points snap to a neighboring point's value when the pointer is close, so flat runs line up without pixel-hunting; click a point to select it, then nudge it with the arrow keys (Left/Right by a quarter beat, Up/Down by 1%) or delete it with Backspace. The curve menu beside the Value slider chooses the interpolation — Linear, Step, Ease In, Ease Out, S-Curve, or Bezier with the same draggable segment handles as automation lanes. With points drawn, the macro's value follows the curve and the Value slider becomes a live readout, animating during playback and following the playhead as you click around while stopped; delete the points to hand control back. No separate automation lane is involved.
• LFO phase is a pure function of the song position, so what the timeline lane draws at a bar is exactly what playback and exports produce there. While stopped, open plug-in windows follow the modulator values at the playhead, and Macro sliders push their targets live.

Automation

Automation lets track or plug-in parameters change over time.

The global automation mode is in the top toolbar:

• Off: automation is not active.
• Read: automation plays back.
• Touch: automation can be written while touching controls.
• Write: automation can be written continuously.

In Arrangement view, use the track automation controls to show automation lanes, choose a parameter, and edit points.

Automation parameter menus include standard MIDI controls and plug-in-specific controls after you touch or adjust those controls in the plug-in editor. Touched plug-in automation controls are saved with the song so they are available when the project is reopened.

Automation menus group available parameters and include effect or instrument names where available, so touched plug-in controls are easier to distinguish.

Common automation actions:

• Drag automation points to change time or value.
• While dragging an automation point, a dotted vertical alignment guide shows where that point lines up with the arrangement timeline. The guide extends through the full arrangement timeline and uses the track color where available.
• Dragging a point close to another point's value on the same lane snaps to that value exactly and draws a horizontal dotted guide at its level — aligning two points lands exact instead of "just close". Drag past the band to release the snap.
• Automation points can snap to dashed guide positions, including initial point placement in an empty lane.
• Dotted horizontal guide lines show the value an automation point holds before the first point and after the last point in the lane.
• If the selected automation lane has no points yet, a dashed horizontal guide shows the current value for that control. For plug-in-specific controls, the guide uses the current value reported by the plug-in when available.
• Use arrow keys to nudge a selected automation point.
• Drag a rectangle across empty lane space to select several points at once. Dragging any selected point then moves the whole selection together (its shape is preserved, stopping as a group at the lane's edges), and the arrow keys nudge the group the same way. Click a point to collapse back to a single selection.
• With several points selected, Copy captures them as a group and Paste drops them at the playhead into whichever lane is currently selected — the same lane, another parameter, another track, or the master lane. The pasted points arrive selected, ready to drag into place. Backspace deletes every selected point.
• Right-click an automation point to delete it.
• Click the trash icon at the far right of an automation lane to delete all automation for that control.
• Double-click an automation point when you need to enter an exact value.
• Copy and paste automation points when working with repeated sections.
• Set the lane's curve mode (Linear, Step, Ease In, Ease Out, S-Curve, or Bezier) from the track's automation controls. In Bezier mode, every segment between two points shows a diamond control handle: drag it to bend the curve toward it, and right-click it to straighten that segment. Handles travel with their points through clip moves, copies, and time edits.

Volume and pan automation disables the matching track-control slider in Arrangement and Mixer so manual slider changes do not fight the automation lane. Deleting that automation data re-enables the slider.

A Mute automation lane gates the track's output over time: points snap to on/off (high means playing), clicking adds a step at the clicked position, and dragging a step point moves its companion with it, keeping the steps square.

Automation belongs to its clips when you rearrange: moving or nudging clips — including to another track with the Up/Down arrows or a drag — carries the covered automation along, shows a ghost preview of the traveling curve during the drag, and asks before overwriting automation already present at the destination. The selected lane also draws dimmed ghost curves of the track's other lanes for alignment.

While playback is stopped, clicking around the timeline pushes each automated parameter's value at that position to its plug-in, so open plug-in windows show the knobs where the curves put them — the same following that happens live during playback.

Editing Time

Magister Music includes time-based editing commands that use the loop region:

• Edit > Insert Silence or Cmd+I: insert empty time at the loop region.
• Edit > Delete Time or Cmd+Shift+Delete: remove the time covered by the loop region.

Delete Time removes content inside the loop region and ripples later clips and automation points left by the deleted duration. These commands affect the arrangement timeline, so set the loop region carefully before using them.

Sample Browser

View > Sample Browser opens a floating window for browsing sample libraries. Add any number of folders or individual files — with the Add Folder button or by dragging them in from Finder — and access persists across launches. Folders are searched recursively and include audio files (wav, aif, mp3, m4a, caf, flac) and MIDI files (mid, midi). The segmented control at the top chooses the display: Folders shows the directory tree (folders with no browsable files anywhere inside are hidden; each shows its file count), and All Files lists every file found across all folders as one flat, name-sorted list — no drilling down. Click the play button on any audio row to audition it, or move through the list with the previous/next buttons in the header; the dice button jumps to a random sample within the current filters, avoiding repeats until everything visible has had a turn. Loops repeat in whole cycles for about sixteen seconds of listening (a one-bar loop plays more passes than an eight-bar one) and then stop on their own; one-shots and files without a recognizable tempo play once. Stopping, skipping, or closing the browser cuts an audition off immediately. The list has Name, Key, BPM, and Length columns — click a header to sort by it, click again to reverse, and the headers stay visible while you scroll (sorting by BPM or Length reads the remaining file lengths in the background). The Key column reads keys written in file names — Gmin, D#m, Amaj, or a delimited F#/Bb — and stays empty when the name carries none. With Match Key checked, samples whose named key clashes with the song's key are hidden (the relative major/minor counts as matching); samples without a key in the name always stay visible. A filter field above the columns narrows the list to names containing the typed text, case-insensitively; in Folders view, folders with matches expand automatically. Each row also has a star for flagging favorites (remembered across launches); clicking the star in the header row shows favorites only. With Sync checked, loops audition at the song tempo, time-stretched to the project BPM so you hear them as they would sit in the song; while the song is playing, the audition holds until the next bar boundary so it starts on the grid. A tempo named in the file name is used as the loop's tempo: an explicit tag like 126bpm or 126_bpm, a bare _126_ that matches the file's length, or — as a fallback — any lone number in the realistic 40–200 BPM range; failing all of those, the tempo is inferred from files lasting a whole number of bars at a whole-number BPM. Each audio row lists the resolved tempo next to the duration: green when confirmed (a bpm tag, or a number corroborated by the file's length), orange when unverified. Files with no name tempo and no reliable guess show no tempo at all. Very fast or slow loops fold to half or double time to stay aligned, one-shots and unrecognized files play untouched, and the placed clip itself is never modified. To use a file: double-click it to insert it at the playhead — audio lands on the selected audio track, MIDI on the selected MIDI track (a matching track is created if the song has none) — or drag it onto a track at exactly the position you want. Right-click a top-level item to remove it from the browser. Auditioning plays through a lightweight built-in player and never interrupts song playback; MIDI rows show a piano icon and are placed rather than auditioned. With Match Key on, the visible results follow the song: changing the song's key re-filters immediately. Space toggles song playback while the browser window is frontmost, exactly as it does in plug-in windows (except while typing in the filter field).

Saving, Opening, and Exporting

Use the File menu for song and export operations:

• New Song: Cmd+N
• Open Song: Cmd+O
• Save Song: Cmd+S
• Save Song As: Cmd+Shift+S
• Revert: restore the last saved version after confirmation
• Export WAV: Cmd+Shift+E
• Export M4A
• Export MP3
• Export Stems: render each audible track to its own WAV file in a chosen folder

Export dialogs default to the current song name. Exports render hosted Audio Unit instruments and effects, not only raw clips. The export progress bar is monotonic, including during MP3 export.

If a valid loop region exists, export uses the loop region as the export range even when loop playback is disabled. The export dialog shows the range before rendering.

Saving and exporting are available only after registering a valid license key. In evaluation mode, those menu items and shortcuts are disabled.

When a song opens, a Loading Plugins progress dialog shows each plug-in as it prepares, so larger sessions make their startup progress visible.

If you close a song with unsaved changes, Magister Music asks whether to save before closing.

Closing the song window quits Magister Music. To continue working, reopen the app and choose File > Open Song or File > New Song.

Software Updates

Magister Music checks for updates automatically at launch and about once a day. When a new version is available, a window shows the release notes and offers to install; the update downloads, verifies its signature, and replaces the app in place, relaunching when ready. Check on demand at any time with Magister Music > Check for Updates....

Preferences

Open Preferences from the top toolbar or with Cmd+,.

Preferences include audio and plug-in related settings, including Audio Unit discovery and rescan behavior.

The Audio section shows the current device buffer size and lets you request a new buffer size for the current default audio devices. Increasing the buffer size can improve playback stability and may help support more simultaneous tracks or heavier plug-in chains, at the cost of higher response latency.

The Audio Units section lets you enable or disable the instrument and effect plug-ins that appear elsewhere in the app. It also manages plug-in groups: create named groups and assign plug-ins to them, and the instrument and effect pickers present each group as a submenu.

The Audio section also includes an Output Device picker for choosing which audio device Magister Music plays through, alongside the Input Device used for recording.

The Interface section lets you set the main window's width and height directly, which is useful for matching a specific display layout. It also chooses whether the Arrangement track controls sit on the right (the default) or the left side of the timeline, and lets you edit the track color preset palette.

The Interface section also has Background controls for coloring the app's background. The Hue slider picks the color — blue, red, green, and so on — and the Intensity slider ranges from the classic near-black look up to a fully colored interface. The background is always kept dark enough that text and controls remain readable. Changes apply immediately, the Left and Right arrow keys nudge a focused slider in fine steps, and Reset to Default restores the standard look.

When exporting, the save dialog offers Normalize loudness to with an adjustable LUFS target (-36 to -3; streaming services commonly use -14): the mix is measured (ITU-R BS.1770) and its gain adjusted to the target, with peaks kept below -1 dBFS. The checkbox and target are remembered between exports.

The Mixer's master strip shows a live loudness readout: short-term LUFS (K-weighted, 3 seconds) and RMS (400 ms) of the master output.

The Colors controls set the playhead color used in every timeline view and the note color used by the Piano Roll and Generator, each with its own Reset button.

The Autosave controls set how often Magister Music saves a crash-recovery copy of the open song while you edit (60 seconds by default), and autosave can be turned off entirely.

The Toolbar controls choose whether the DSP readout shows the red missed-deadline counter, and whether a small oscilloscope of the master output appears beside the Beat readout — a live waveform of what you hear, drawn in your playhead color at the display's refresh rate. Both are off by default.

The Meters control keeps level meters running while a plug-in window is open. Meters normally pause in that situation so the plug-in's interface stays smooth; keeping them running costs some drawing performance.

The Collapsed track padding control adds up to 40 extra points of height to collapsed Arrangement track rows, for a roomier layout than the tight default.

Collapsed Arrangement track rows also show a slim stereo level meter just right of the Solo button, updated at a reduced rate so many collapsed tracks stay cheap to draw. The meter is on by default and can be turned off with the Show a small level meter on collapsed track rows toggle.

The Shortcuts section lists configurable app shortcuts by category. Click a shortcut to record a replacement key command, use Reset to restore an individual default, Clear to leave an action unmapped, or Reset All to restore every default shortcut.

The Help menu includes both the bundled Magister Music User Guide and a Website item that opens the Magister Music product page.

Shortcut Reference

The shortcut tables list the default shortcuts. Many defaults can be changed or cleared in Preferences > Shortcuts.

Beyond the defaults below, Preferences > Shortcuts also lists many actions that ship without a key — mute/solo/freeze/rename the selected track, slice/merge/reverse/rename clips, silence editing, take switching, clip gain and pitch nudges, MIDI note tools, generate, tempo nudges, loop-region resizing, follow-playhead, the automation mode, the undo history panel, and more (grouped by category: Track, Clip, Takes, MIDI, Generator, Transport). Click any of them and record a key to put it on your keyboard.

Project

Shortcut	Action
Cmd+N	New song
Cmd+O	Open song
Cmd+S	Save song, registered mode only
Cmd+Shift+S	Save song as, registered mode only
Cmd+Shift+E	Export WAV, registered mode only
Cmd+,	Preferences
Cmd+?	User guide

Views

Shortcut	Action
Cmd+1	Arrangement view
Cmd+2	Mixer view
Cmd+3	Piano Roll view
Cmd+4	Generator view
Cmd+5	Sample Editor view
Tab	Toggle Arrangement/Mixer or Piano Roll/Generator, depending on the current view; returns to Arrangement from the Sample Editor
Cmd++ or Cmd+Shift+=	Zoom in horizontally
Cmd+-	Zoom out horizontally

Transport

Shortcut	Action
Space	Play or pause
Home	Return to start
End	Jump to the end of the last clip
Page Up	Move playhead to previous bar
Page Down	Move playhead to next bar
F9	Toggle MIDI recording
Cmd+L	Toggle loop, or set loop from selected clips or selected empty time
Left/Right Arrow	Nudge the loop region by its own length while the pointer is over the loop region header or the Mixer timeline overview

Arrangement and Tracks

Shortcut	Action
Cmd+T	Add audio track
Cmd+Shift+T	Add MIDI track
Cmd+Shift+M	Add MIDI clip
Cmd+I	Insert silence at loop region
Cmd+Shift+Delete	Delete time in loop region
Cmd+Shift+Forward Delete	Delete time in loop region
A	Toggle selected track automation

Selection and Clips

Shortcut	Action
Cmd+C	Copy selection
Cmd+X	Cut selection
Cmd+V	Paste selection
Cmd+Shift+V	Paste audio sample
Cmd+D	Duplicate selection
Delete	Delete selection
0	Disable or enable selected clips
Left/Right Arrow	Nudge selected arrangement clips by the current arrangement grid value
Cmd-click	Add or remove clips from selection
Shift-click	Select a range of clips

MIDI

Shortcut	Action
Cmd+U	Quantize selected MIDI notes, or the full clip if no notes are selected
Cmd+A	Select all MIDI notes in the selected clip when Piano Roll view is active
Arrow keys	Nudge selected MIDI notes
Shift+Up	Move selected MIDI notes up one octave
Shift+Down	Move selected MIDI notes down one octave

Automation

Shortcut	Action
Arrow keys	Nudge selected automation point

Plug-ins

Shortcut	Action
Cmd+Option+P	Toggle remembered plug-in windows
Space	Play or pause while a plug-in window is focused

Practical Tips

• Use loop playback while building a part, then use Cmd+L with selected clips to quickly loop around them.
• Use Mixer view when you want to watch many meters at once.
• Use Arrangement view when you need to edit clip timing, selection regions, automation, or loop placement.
• Use Piano Roll for precise MIDI note editing.
• Use Generator to rapidly explore chord, melody, rhythm, and variation ideas, then copy or edit the resulting MIDI.
• If a MIDI clip is not audible, check that the clip is enabled, the track is not muted, the instrument is loaded, and the track volume is up.
• If a plug-in-heavy song takes a moment on first playback, let playback start once, then stop and restart if needed while setting up the session.

Licenses

LAME MP3 Encoder

Magister Music uses the LAME MP3 Encoder version 3.100 for MP3 export.

LAME is licensed under the GNU Library General Public License, Version 2. Commercial use is permitted under the LGPL when LAME is linked as a separate library, use of LAME is acknowledged, and any modifications to LAME are released under the LGPL.

LAME project: www.mp3dev.org

Source archive used for the bundled library: https://fossies.org/linux/misc/lame-3.100.tar.gz