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.

Contents

• Getting Started
• The Window
• The Command Palette
• Playing
• Selecting & Editing
• History & Takes
• Ingredients, Reduce & Bake
• Slices & Pads
• Stretch & Pitch Shift
• Recording
• Batch Conversion
• Saving & Export
• MIDI Control
• Settings
• Trial & Purchase
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Troubleshooting
• SoundEdit for iPhone & iPad
• Contact Support

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, takes, and an arrangement, so you can see what "remembered" means — press ⌘Z a few times and watch it walk back through work done before the file ever reached you.

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 — LO P1 P2 HI are the four EQ bands; PITCH and VOL do what they say. Drag them, or turn a MIDI knob at them (see MIDI Control).
• The lamps — REC, PLAY, LOOP show state and take clicks.
• The rack — SCOPE (the live waveform), GONIO (stereo image), and EQ · SPECTRUM (the EQ curve over a live spectrum). While recording, the whole rack monitors the input.
• The status band — the bottom line. It whispers what just happened (take saved · its recipe began at the first second) once, quietly, and gets out of the way on the next keypress. It is also where confirms happen — SoundEdit never blocks you with a dialog box.

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.

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.
• 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 & Takes

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 flattened is never gone.
• Takes — alternate versions of the file live side by side in the takes browser. A recording, a bake, a big edit: each can be kept as a take and switched between freely.
• Work is crash-proof: history is written as you go, 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.

• Reduce mixes the layered arrangement down into the file. The arrangement is kept in history — Step Back returns it, un-flattened.
• Bake renders the current state (EQ, stretch, layers) into a new audio file wherever you point it.
• Palette category Ingredients holds the full command set.

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 (from F2 upward, the OP-1 keyboard convention), with velocity setting the level of each hit. The base note is adjustable in Settings ▸ MIDI.
• 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.

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 records now — no arm dialog, no file sheet. space stops, and the take opens under your hands, ready to edit.

• The take starts at the first sound, not the first captured frame — the silence while you reach for the instrument is trimmed for you (Settings ▸ Input turns this off).
• m 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 — File ▸ 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.
• Punch — record at the cursor to punch new audio into the open file. The punched take 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 · return runs · esc cancels — and return runs it. That's the whole interface.

• Outputs land in Converted/ inside the dropped folder. Originals are never touched — there is no in-place mode at all.
• Every file is decoded, loudness-measured, gain-normalized to your target, sample-rate converted with a mastering-grade converter, dithered, and encoded. If a file's loudness gain would clip, that file lands quieter than target instead — never limited, never pumped.
• 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.

Saving & Export

• Save / Save As — WAV, AIFF, CAF, FLAC, ALAC, and AAC, with dither options for bit-depth reduction. (MP3 is deliberately absent — lossless plus AAC covers modern delivery.)
• Bake renders the processed state to a new file (see Ingredients).
• Teenage Engineering export — sends samples to TE hardware in its native format, slices included; 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 ▸ MIDI holds a trainable command map: pick a command, move a control, done. Any palette command can live on a knob or pad.
• Slice pads — see Slices & Pads; the pad base note is set here too.
• Device picking and channel filtering live in the same 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.
• Output — output device, sample-rate behavior.
• MIDI — device picker, channel filter, trainable command map, slice-pad base note.
• Snap — what edit edges snap to.
• Batch — the folder-conversion chain.

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
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

Everything else lives in the palette — and any of it can be learned onto a MIDI control.

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 File ▸ 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).