SoundEdit — Help

An audio editor that plays like an instrument. One window, keyboard-first, no dialogs in your way — and it never forgets an edit.

Getting Started

Drop a sound anywhere on the window, or use File ▸ Open. The file opens under your hands: the waveform fills the canvas, space plays, and every edit you make from that moment is remembered — not just until you close the file, but permanently.

The fastest tour is the demo: Help ▸ Open Demo Session opens a loop that already carries history, versions, and an arrangement, so you can see what "remembered" means — press ⌘Z and the last half bar, reversed before the file ever reached you, plays forward again; Edit ▸ History ▸ Browse Timeline lists the chop and the reverse. A fresh install opens it on its own, once. The break is a real drummer: Uptempo Rock Drum Groove Upbeat 160 BpM by lennartgreen, eight bars at 160 on a Gretsch kit, released CC0 on Freesound.

The notes that come with it — what SoundEdit is, and lines you click to try each thing on the open file — arrive the first time the demo plays and are always in Help ▸ Liner Notes. esc puts them away.

The Window

SoundEdit is one window, an instrument panel rather than a document full of inspectors:

The canvas — the waveform, drawn as a phosphor-style beam trace. Click to place the playback cursor, drag to select.
The knobs — the four knobs follow the knob page, the way an OP-1's encoders do: SAMPLE (start, end, fade), LOOP (loop in, loop out, direction), EQ (one band's on, frequency, Q and gain, then the drives), the amp and filter envelopes, and FILTER. ⌃1–⌃4 turn the pages like the OP-1's T1–T4, and pressing one again steps to the page's next part. Each dial shows what its knob moves; right-click a dial to change it (Settings ▸ Commands ▸ Knob Pages lists every page). PITCH and VOL do what they say. Drag any knob, or turn a MIDI knob at it (see MIDI Control). The sound you set is the file's: the EQ, the filter, both envelopes, PITCH and FADE come back when you open it again, and a file you haven't shaped opens with them at rest. VOL is your listening level and stays where you leave it.
The lamps — REC, PLAY, LOOP show state and take clicks.
The view — View ▸ Normal View stays where you put it; Follow Playhead (⌃⇧F) rides along as the file plays; Center-Lock (⌃F) keeps the start cursor on the center line and moves the audio under it, the way tape and a CDJ do. Drag the canvas in any mode and the view is yours again. The mode you pick stays from file to file and launch to launch. Another file opens showing all of itself; the file SoundEdit reopens when it starts comes back at the zoom and scroll you left it, on the same knob page.
The rack — SCOPE (the live waveform), GONIO (stereo image), and EQ · SPECTRUM (the EQ curve over a live spectrum). Click the EQ title to step to the amp envelope, the filter envelope and the filter; the knobs go with it. The filter's KEY is lit while key tracking is on. Click the GONIO title (or run File Statistics) for STATS: what the file measures — peak and RMS per channel, loudness in LUFS, clipping and DC offset, the root note of a pitched sound, and its length. The numbers follow your edits; click the title again for the goniometer. While recording, the whole rack monitors the input.
The status band — the bottom line. It whispers what just happened (take saved · safe from its first second) once, quietly, and gets out of the way on the next keypress. It is also where confirms happen — no dialog box ever stands between you and an edit.

The Command Palette

Press ⌘K (or :) and type what you want. Every command in the app is there, and the palette speaks other editors' vocabulary too — type bounce, flatten, render, or snapshot and it finds the SoundEdit command that does that job. Every palette command can also be triggered from a MIDI controller (MIDI Control).

Playing

space plays and stops. There is one selection rule and no modes:

A click collapses the selection to a cursor — playback runs from there to the end of the file.
A drag makes a selection — playback runs inside it. The selection's edges are the start and end cursors; there is no separate pair of markers to manage.
Loop — the LOOP lamp loops the playable region. Loop points ride your edits: cut inside a loop and the loop stays musically where you left it. The loop is the file's — on or off, its points and its direction come back with it, and another file opens with its own.

Selecting & Editing

Cut / Copy / Paste — the Edit menu or the standard keys. Paste splices at the cursor.
Trim removes the selection; Crop keeps it and removes everything else.
Trim Silence… tops and tails the whole file: everything before the first moment and after the last moment the sound reaches a threshold (−60 dB unless you type another) is removed, keeping a millisecond of the quiet on each side so an attack is never shaved. One undo step. It says so when there is nothing to trim, and it leaves a silent file alone.
Process ▸ Channels — Swap Left and Right exchanges the two sides of the selection (the whole file when there is none). Convert to Mono makes the whole file one channel: Mix averages the two sides, so identical sides come out unchanged and the result can never clip; Left and Right keep that side untouched. One undo step brings the stereo back. If ingredients are sounding, reduce them first.
Process ▸ Bake in Place puts what one press plays into the file. The audio between START and END (from the cursor to the end when nothing is selected) is replaced by that audio played through PITCH, FADE, the filter, the envelope and the EQ, and those controls go back to neutral, so the sound doesn't change — but Normalize, Save As and every edit after act on what you hear. One undo step brings back the audio and the controls together. VOL isn't baked, and the envelope's release stays yours: it shapes a key you let go early. With the loop on it bakes the tone — pitch, filter and EQ — and leaves the envelope and FADE playing live, since the loop repeats what's inside it; the loop keeps its place on the new audio. With ingredients sounding, reduce them first.
Process ▸ Normalize Loudness… brings the selection (the whole file when there is none) to the loudness you type. It follows the same true-peak ceiling as the folder batch (Settings ▸ Batch): if reaching the target would push the peaks past the ceiling, the gain is held there, the file comes out a little quieter than asked, and SoundEdit tells you the loudness it landed on. It never limits or clips. With the ceiling switched off the gain is exactly as asked, and you are told if the peaks now pass full scale. Gain… is never limited.
File ▸ File Info… (⌘I) shows the open file's title, artist, comment, copyright and date, and lets you change them. There is no OK button: a field is kept as you type, remembered with the file, and goes on whatever you write from it next — Save As, Save Edit, Bake, exported slices. Fields you leave alone stay the file's own. Use the File's Own drops your changes. The original on disk is never changed.
A file's text travels with it. Title, artist, comment, copyright and date are carried onto whatever SoundEdit writes from a file — Save As, Save Edit, Bake, a folder batch, exported slices — in the new container's own native place, even across formats (a tagged WAV batched to FLAC or M4A keeps its fields). A WAV carries them twice — as INFO tags and as Broadcast Wave (bext) description, originator and date — and a source's own Broadcast Wave chunk (time reference, UMID, coding history) rides along whole. AIFF has no place for a date, so that one field stays behind.
File ▸ Export Slices as Files… writes one file per slice; Export Marker Regions as Files… writes one per stretch between neighbouring markers (the file's start and end count as the outer ones). Pick where; the files land in a new folder there, in the source's own format, cut exactly on the slice edges with nothing added. Nothing already on disk is overwritten. Names follow Settings ▸ Batch ▸ Names.
Snapping — edits snap to zero crossings so cuts don't click. Snap behavior is configurable in Settings ▸ Snap.
Markers — press m to drop a marker at the cursor, including while a recording is rolling.

History & Versions

This is the part other editors don't do: SoundEdit's history is permanent. Close the file, restart the Mac, come back next month — ⌘Z still walks back through every edit. Nothing about this needs setting up, and there is no project container to manage; it simply travels with your file.

Step Back returns you to any earlier point in the history — including past a Reduce, so an arrangement you reduced is never gone.
Versions — alternate arrangements of the file live side by side in the versions browser. A recording, a bake, a big edit: each can be kept as a version and switched to instantly, and every one stays editable.
Knobs are history too. Once a knob stops moving, the turn is one step: the Edit menu reads Undo EQ, Undo Filter, Undo Envelope, Undo Pitch or Undo Fade, and ⌘Z takes it back. A change in a plug-in's own window works the same way, named for the plug-in. These steps come back with the file like any edit.
Work is crash-proof: history is written as you go, and a knob or a plug-in is saved a moment after it stops moving, so a power cut costs you nothing that had already happened.

Ingredients, Reduce & Bake

Ingredients are sounds layered onto your file — drag audio in (or ⌥-drag a selection out and back) and it sits on its own lane above the waveform, playing in place.

The file itself plays as ingredient 1 under whatever you add. Drag a band's corners for its fades, its edges to trim, its plate to move it — every handle snaps to transients, beat lines and slice edges (hold ⌘ mid-drag to skip the magnet). With one armed, ⇧← / ⇧→ nudge it 10 ms and ⇧⌥← / ⇧⌥→ jump it to the previous / next snap target. An ingredient always starts inside the file; a MIDI knob on Ingredient: Position sweeps it from the start to the end. A tail past the file's end plays before Reduce and shows on a dimmer ground past the file's edge; Reduce grows the file to it.
Reduce mixes the layered arrangement down into the file. ⌘Z returns the arrangement with its audio; History: Step Back reaches it too.
Bake renders what the sample plays — its range, FADE and PITCH, through the envelopes, filter and EQ, with the ingredients and any stretch — into a new audio file wherever you point it. VOL isn't baked: it's your listening level. Process ▸ Bake in Place renders the voice into the file itself instead, once the ingredients are reduced.
Two fades, two jobs: an ingredient's fades shape it in the mix, and Reduce keeps them. The FADE knob fades the sample in and out as it plays — the transport and every pad — and draws on the marquee; Bake renders it. It rests while the loop is on.
Palette category Ingredients holds the full command set.

Audio Unit Slots

Eight slots for your Audio Unit effects, in series. The file plays through them after the knobs' voice and before the meters and VOL, so what you hear is what Bake prints.

The SLOTS panel — the rack's right tile: click its title past FILTER, or run any slot command, and the eight lines show. The lamp says it all — ● on, ○ off, × missing, … loading, · empty. Click a line to arm it (the slot commands act on the armed slot), click its lamp for its power, double-click it for its plug-in's window, drag it onto another line to move it. Its ▾, or a right-click, lists every plug-in by maker, the ones you used last on top.
Choose Plug-in… turns the status band into a list: type any words of the name or the maker (fab q finds Pro-Q 3 · FabFilter), ↑ / ↓ to pick, return loads it, esc leaves. On a filled slot it replaces the plug-in, or empties the slot.
The plug-in's window — its own view, a preset menu and Enabled, one window per slot. It takes the keyboard while you type in its fields; click the canvas to give it back. space still plays.
CHAIN, lit in the panel's title, bypasses every slot at once (Bypass Chain). The title also reads the chain's latency, SLOTS · 23 ms: while the file plays, the playhead sits that far behind so it marks what you hear.
A plug-in hears the file: a synced delay or LFO runs at its tempo, and a plug-in that watches the transport moves while it plays. Open another file or jump to a marker and the plug-ins start from rest; pads ring into each other, as notes do.
The chain is the file's. It comes back when you open the file: same plug-ins, settings, power and bypass. A file that never had one opens with the slots empty. A change in a plug-in's window is an undo step named for the plug-in; choosing, emptying, moving and switching slots are saved in the file's History, so Step Back reaches each.
Apply Slots runs START…END through every slot that is on and writes it into the file, then bypasses the chain so you don't hear it twice. ⌘Z brings back the audio and the chain together. A reverb or delay at the file's end keeps its tail.
Bake prints the chain after the voice; Bake in Place does the same into the file and leaves the chain bypassed. A device export that bakes prints it into each slice. Save, Save As and Export Slices write the file's own audio, without the chain.
MISSING — a file opened on a Mac without one of its plug-ins plays that slot dry and keeps its settings for when the plug-in is back. Bake stops and names it; switch the slot off and it goes ahead without it.
The Library's audition plays dry, outside the chain: it's there to tell you what a sound is.
Every slot command is in Process ▸ Slots and the palette, without a key until you give it one in Settings ▸ Commands. Settings ▸ Plug-ins rescans the Mac and sets a slot to run in or out of process.

Slices & Pads

Chop a loop into slices and play it like a pad instrument — without leaving the keyboard:

' / ; arm the next / previous slice — its exact span becomes the selection, and space auditions it.
Slice Play Mode (palette) turns the piano key row — a w s e d f t g y h u j k o l — into fifteen pads: one keystroke arms a slice and plays it, MPC-style.
MIDI pads — with slice play on, MIDI notes trigger slices, with velocity setting the level of each hit. Each device has its own pad layout: an OP-1 or OP-XY plays from F3 upward at its power-on octave, an EP plays by its pad groups, and any other controller is one Learn away (Settings ▸ MIDI, or the Slice Pads row in Commands).
Edge drags & LINK SLICES — slice boundaries drag freely; linked mode moves neighbors together so the kit stays gapless.
OP-1 round-trip — open a sample from a connected OP-1, edit, and send it back with slices intact.

Tempo & Beat Grid

SoundEdit reads a file's tempo the moment it opens and shows it in the status line as TEMPO. Loop whole beats and, when you let go of the loop, the reading becomes exact, with the bar count beside it (TEMPO 120 · 4 BARS). A loop that doesn't land on the file's beat leaves the tempo as it was, so looping to listen never changes it; to say how many beats a stretch holds, use Tempo from Selection…. The tempo follows every edit. Click TEMPO to set it yourself.

A recording longer than ten minutes isn't read until you ask: Re-analyze sample in Settings ▸ Snap reads the whole file. A loop on it is for listening, so it leaves the tempo alone.

⌥⌘= doubles the tempo and ⌥⌘- halves it for this file — the way every DJ tool settles a 70 versus 140 reading. The file remembers the choice.
Set Tempo… — type the tempo (Process menu, or click TEMPO). A tempo set by hand belongs to the file: it wins over detection and is saved with it — the answer for vocals, pads, field recordings, or a reading you disagree with.
Tempo from Selection… — select whole beats and say how many. The tempo is exact to the frame, and beat 1 goes at the selection's start.
Beat 1 stays where you put it — with Tempo from Selection, or with a tempo set by hand, Anchor here in Settings ▸ Snap (beat 1 at the start cursor). The file keeps it through reopening, tempo changes and edits: cut audio before it and beat 1 moves with the sound; cut beat 1 itself and detection takes over, until ⌘Z puts it back.
Use Detected Tempo — hands the tempo, and beat 1, back to detection, and turns detection on if it was off.
Beat lines are drawn over the waveform and snap the cursors and ingredient handles. Each beat line sits on the hit the detector found there, not on the average grid; bars are drawn heavier than beats, beats heavier than subdivisions. Zoomed out, the lines thin to bars, then every 4 and every 16 bars, and hide when even those would crowd. Subdivision and phase live in Settings → Snap.
Stretch to BPM… in the Process menu opens on the file's own tempo.
The tempo travels with the file: Save As writes it into the WAV's acid chunk (Ableton, FL Studio and Reaper read it), and the OP-XY preset and EP slice WAVs carry the same chunk. The OP-1's AIFF format has no place for a tempo.

While a sequencer's clock sets the beat grid (Follow external tempo), the status line shows both tempos: TEMPO 119.89 · CLOCK 120.

Playing in a sequencer's tempo. With Lock sample tempo to the sequencer on (Settings ▸ MIDI ▸ Sequencer), the sound plays stretched to the tempo of a sequencer sending MIDI clock. The file itself is untouched, and nothing lands in history until Commit at Sequencer Tempo in the Process menu. When the file's tempo already matches the clock, it plays as itself — no stretch, no drift — and the status line says playing untouched. How close counts as a match depends on where the tempo came from, with the clock's own measuring error allowed on top:

Set by hand — within 0.005 %, since no two instruments' clocks agree exactly. Past that, it stretches exactly.
Counted over a loop range — within 0.01 %.
Detected — within 0.3 %, because a detector's reading is only that precise. If the sound really is 119.7 against a clock at 120, set 119.7 with Set Tempo… and it stretches.

Staying on the beat. While the lock is engaged, playback keeps to the sequencer's beats, the way a sampler's step does. With Follow external transport on, the sequencer's Start puts the loop's first beat (beat 1 if it lies inside the loop, else the first beat after the loop's start) on the downbeat; a loop that isn't a whole number of beats restarts on the nearest whole beat — a 3.7-beat loop every 4 beats, with a little silence, and a 4.2-beat one cut at 4 — and Continue lands where the song is. Without Follow external transport, space starts on the clock's next beat. In between, the playback rate bends by at most a tenth of a percent to stay put; nothing is written to the file.

Stretch & Pitch Shift

Process ▸ Stretch changes length without changing pitch; Process ▸ Pitch Shift changes pitch without changing length, with a formant toggle for voices. Both use SoundEdit's own engine — built for musical material, and included in the base app rather than fenced off. Markers, slices, and loop points ride the stretch and stay musically in place, and like everything else, both are ordinary history entries — ⌘Z works.

Recording

⌘⇧R or the REC lamp records now — no arm dialog, no file sheet — and space stops. Everything about a take lives in the Record menu, and its first item says where the take will land before you press it:

No file open — a new recording, which opens under your hands when you stop.
Stopped, with a selection — records over the selection and stops at its end.
Stopped, with just the cursor — records from the cursor onward, over what was there, like tape.
Playing — punches in at the playhead: play up to the spot, then record.
Record ▸ Record Into New File (⌥⌘⇧R) always starts a new recording, whatever is open.

Pre-roll. With Record ▸ Pre-Roll on, a take into the file becomes a punch-in: Record plays the lead-up to the selection or cursor, then records from exactly there. Playback stops at that point, so you hear only yourself, and the first item reads Punch In Over Selection or Punch In at Cursor. The time readout counts the lead-in down (−0:01.9, −0:01.8, …) and turns into the take's clock at 0:00. The lead-in's length is in Settings ▸ Input; stopping during it records nothing.

The take starts at the first sound, not the first captured frame — the silence while you reach for the instrument is trimmed for you (Record ▸ Start at the First Sound turns this off; Normalize on Stop sits beside it).
m (or Record ▸ Mark Moment) drops markers while rolling — mark the good moments as they happen.
Takes are crash-proof from the first second: audio is written to disk as it is captured, so a dead battery never loses a take. Recordings land in ~/Music/SoundEdit/Recordings/ with dated names.
Sources — Record ▸ Record From picks what to record: any input device, What's Playing (the system mix), or a single app's audio. For a multi-channel interface, Settings ▸ Input chooses which channel (mono) or pair (stereo) a take records — remembered per device.
A take recorded into the open file splices in as a history entry, so it is as undoable as any edit.

Batch Conversion

Drop a folder on the window. The status band offers a one-line confirm — 9 files · wav 24-bit · −16 LUFS · ceiling −1 dBTP · return runs · esc cancels — and return runs it. That's the whole interface.

Outputs land in Converted/ inside the dropped folder, each one a new file. The originals stay exactly as they were.
Every file is decoded, sample-rate converted with a mastering-grade converter, measured as it will be written, gain-normalized to your target, dithered, and encoded. Normalize is exactly what it says: Peak puts each file's highest sample on the level you set; Loudness brings each file to the target LUFS; Off changes no level at all.
With Loudness, the True-peak ceiling (on at −1 dBTP until you change it) holds the gain back when reaching the target would push the peaks past it: that file lands quieter than target instead — never limited, never pumped — and the confirm line names the ceiling. It is a true-peak ceiling (ITU-R BS.1770-4, in dBTP): it holds what a converter will reconstruct between the samples, which is what a delivery spec's “−1 dBTP” means. The STATS page shows the same measurement beside the loudness.
Settings ▸ Batch ▸ Channels folds every file to mono (mix, left, or right) or swaps left and right — the same arithmetic as the editor's commands, applied first, so the file that is trimmed and measured is the file that is written. Mono sources pass through. Mono when left and right match folds only the files whose two sides carry the same sound — sample libraries are full of them, at twice the size — and leaves real stereo alone; the batch report names each file it folded. Keep unless you change it.
With Trim silence from start and end on in Settings ▸ Batch, each file is topped and tailed first — by the same rule as Trim Silence… — so loudness is measured on the sound, not the dead air, and every output starts and ends at true zero. Off until you turn it on. It is made for one-shots: a loop that opens on a rest would lose the rest and slip off its bar lines, so batch loops in a folder of their own with this off.
Normalize the set as a group applies one gain to every file instead of one each, so a kit's hits keep their balance: the loudest file lands on the target, the rest keep their distance below it, and — with Loudness — the true-peak ceiling is held against the set's highest true peak. Off until you turn it on.
Samplers read a WAV's root note and loop from its smpl chunk. A file that has one keeps it through the batch — the loop moves with anything trimmed off the front and is rescaled with the sample rate. Turn on Write the detected root note into each WAV (Settings ▸ Batch, WAV only) and files that have none get the note SoundEdit hears, with its fine tune; a file's own note is never overruled. Exported slices follow the same switch, and the slice that holds the loop gets the loop.
MP3 is a batch format and a Save As / Bake type: constant bitrate (192 kbps unless you pick another), for the delivery specs that still ask for it. MP3 holds 32, 44.1 or 48 kHz and one or two channels, so a higher-rate file is converted first — by SoundEdit's own converter — and a wider file is refused with a reason. Text fields travel as ID3. The encoder is LAME, a separate replaceable library inside the app; see Help ▸ Acknowledgements.
Settings ▸ Batch ▸ Names sets how outputs are named, with a live example under each field. Tokens: {name} the source's name, {n} its number in the set, {note} the detected root note, {bpm} the open file's tempo (empty in a folder batch), {rate}, {bits}, {ch}. A token with nothing to say is left out, and two files that would share a name get a number — one never overwrites the other.
Converted/batch report.txt lists every file's measured loudness and applied gain. A bad file fails alone; the rest of the set completes.
The conversion chain — format, bit depth, sample rate, loudness target — is set in Settings ▸ Batch, and the palette's Batch Convert Folder… does the same from a folder picker. Bake writes with the same settings (the Bake panel shows and changes them), so a sound you bake and a folder you batch come out to one spec.

Saving & Export

Save / Save As write the document as it is — WAV, AIFF, CAF, FLAC, ALAC, AAC or MP3, at the depth and rate you pick, dithered when a 16- or 24-bit file quantises. The format rows are the ones Bake and the batch show, and the panel's last line says what it will write. To change the level, Normalize first (it's an edit, and it undoes) — after Bake in Place when the voice's EQ, drive or filter should count.
Bake renders what plays — the range, fade and pitch through the envelopes, filter and EQ (VOL is only how loud you listen) — and writes it with Settings ▸ Batch's spec: channels, trim, and the level, measured on what the bake renders. A peak or loudness target therefore includes whatever the voice's EQ, drive and filter added. Keep original keeps the file's own channels and rate. See Ingredients.
Teenage Engineering export — sends samples to TE hardware in its native format, slices included, sounding as they do in SoundEdit: PITCH, START, END and the loop go in the device's own settings where it has them, and FADE, the filter, the envelope and the EQ are baked into the audio. On the OP-XY sampler, a reverse or ping-pong loop is written into the sample, and its release is set to match. The export panel lists what it bakes before it writes. A sample fetched from an OP-1 can go straight back to it.

MIDI Control

Play it — a connected MIDI keyboard plays the open sound chromatically, and velocity matters.
Learn anything — Settings ▸ Commands lists every command with its key and its MIDI control: click the MIDI cell, move a control, done. Play/Stop, Continue and Stop are there too, so a controller's transport buttons can drive SoundEdit. Sending to and pulling from an instrument stays in File ▸ Instruments and the palette.
Knob pages — an OP-1's T1–T4 buttons turn the knob pages, the same pages ⌃1–⌃4 and the EQ title turn, so the screen always shows what the hardware's knobs move.
One setup per device — every device that is plugged in has its own bindings, pad layout and, for the OP family, its knob surface. An OP-1, OP-XY or EP arrives already set up from a built-in profile; a control learned on any device is filed under that device. Save a device's setup as a profile to load on another.
Slice pads — see Slices & Pads; each device's pad layout is set in Settings ▸ MIDI.
Device picking and channel filtering live in the MIDI tab; hot-plugged devices appear without a relaunch.

Settings

General — timecode ruler, playback behavior, dither, cache size, and the loudness target used by Normalize and Batch.
Input — recording source, per-device channel selection, first-sound trimming, the punch-in pre-roll.
Output — output device, sample-rate behavior.
MIDI — which device to listen to, channel filter, each device's slice-pad layout, clock follow.
Commands — every command with its key and its MIDI control, per device; built-in and saved profiles; restore default keys.
Snap — what edit edges snap to.
Batch — the folder-conversion chain.
Plug-ins — the effects on this Mac by maker, Rescan, and whether each slot's plug-in runs in or out of process.

Trial & Purchase

SoundEdit ships with a 14-day full trial — every feature, no watermarks, no feature gates. A quiet banner on launch shows the days remaining.

One-time purchase. No subscription. Help ▸ Purchase SoundEdit… shows the price (the App Store's live, localized price) and, after you buy, becomes your receipt.
When the trial ends, your files and history remain fully readable and playable — editing, saving, recording, and batch wait for the unlock. Nothing is ever lost.
The unlock survives reinstalling the app. Restore Purchases on the purchase card brings it to another Mac.
A purchase pending approval (Ask to Buy, bank verification) unlocks automatically when it clears — no need to buy again.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Key	Action
`space`	Play / stop (stops a rolling recording)
`⌘K` or `:`	Command palette
`⌘Z`	Step back through history — including past sessions
`⌘⇧R`	Record (the Record menu says where)
`⌘=` / `⌘-` (or `+` / `-`)	Zoom in / out
`⌘0` / `⌥⌘0`	Show the whole file / zoom to the selection
`home` / `end`	Cursor to the start / end of the file
`m`	Drop a marker (works while recording)
`'` / `;`	Arm next / previous slice
`a`…`l` row	Slice pads (in Slice Play Mode) / piano keys otherwise
`⌘?`	This help (and Help ▸ Keys and Commands… for every key)

Everything else lives in the palette. To change a key, or to put any command on a MIDI control, open Settings ▸ Commands: every command is listed with its key and its MIDI control side by side. Click a key to change it, + to add another, or the MIDI cell and move a control; greyed keys are fixed. The MIDI column belongs to the device picked above the table; an OP-1, OP-XY or EP comes set up.

Troubleshooting

Recording is silent or won't start

The first recording asks for microphone permission; if it was denied, grant it in System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Microphone. If a chosen input device has been unplugged, Record says so rather than silently falling back to the built-in mic — pick a source under Record ▸ Record From.

Recording an app captures nothing

An app can only be captured while it is actually making sound. What's Playing asks once for the system-audio permission; watch the meters move while rolling to confirm the capture is live.

The purchase button says "Loading…"

The App Store hasn't delivered the product yet — check the network connection and give it a moment. Your trial keeps running either way.

Something else

Help ▸ Send Diagnostic Report… packages the technical details support needs — nothing about your audio content leaves the machine.

SoundEdit for iPhone & iPad

SoundEdit for iPhone and iPad is in development, built on the same engine as the Mac app — and built recorder-first: pull the phone out, hit record, and the take opens under your hands, crash-proof from its first second, with the same permanent history the Mac app keeps.

It ships after SoundEdit for Mac, and this page will grow its full documentation then. In the meantime, the Mac view shows what the family does.

Contact Support

support@audiofile.engineering — a human reads it. Include the diagnostic report if the question is about a specific misbehavior (Help ▸ Send Diagnostic Report… on the Mac).