Recording

Arming

One arm path covers audio and MIDI: press C (arms the selected track), or click the ● dot on a track header or mixer strip.

• On an instrument track, arming routes your MIDI keyboard in (with live monitoring through the instrument). If no MIDI device is present it says so plainly.
• The selected MIDI track is armed for you: select it (a new MIDI track is selected as it is made) and your keyboard plays and records there without touching the dot. This implicit arm shows as a pale hollow ring and moves with your selection; click the ring to arm the track explicitly (a solid red dot), which stays put when you select something else. Click a solid dot to disarm.
• On an audio track, Zammoth opens your audio inputs on first use (macOS will ask for microphone permission the first time) and, if the track has no input assigned yet, auto-routes the first enabled input. Every hardware input channel is individually routable — pick one explicitly via the track menu ▸ Audio input ▸ (or No input).
• If arming leaves more than one track armed, the status bar tells you — a forgotten arm is never discovered mid-take.

Input monitoring is per track — the mixer's MONITOR row (In / Auto / Off), in the I/O section (View ▸ In/Out, ⌥⌘I). Two tracks fed by the same input can disagree, so you can monitor the part you are playing while another armed track stays quiet. See The I/O section.

Preferences ▸ Recording ▸ Monitoring (Off / Automatic / Always on) sets the default a new routing starts from; a track that has never been given its own mode follows it. The default is Automatic, chosen so a laptop's mic and speakers can't feed back the first time you arm.

If you hear yourself late, it is usually a hosted plug-in on the track: the engine waits for it, which is right for mixing and unplayable for tracking. Turn on the mixer's Track Delay row (View ▸ Track Delay, ⌥⌘D) and click that channel's KEEP LATENCY latch so it reads LOW LATENCY — while the track is armed, its latency-inducing plug-ins are bypassed, and they come back the moment you disarm. See The Mixer ▸ Track Delay.

Recording a take

Press Record (● or F9), then Play — or just Record. With a count-in set (None / 1 bar / 2 bars — the cap is two), the metronome counts you in. Recording with loop on stacks one take per loop pass onto the clip; Punch (⊐⊏) restricts recording to inside the loop range so you can re-record a section without touching the rest.

While the take rolls, the clip draws itself in real time on the track's lane — the body grows behind the playhead and the waveform fills in as it is written, with a red edge on its title band marking it as "being recorded". When you stop, it becomes the real clip in place.

Forgot to arm? Zammoth keeps a rolling buffer of every input that is routed to a track while the transport runs (Preferences ▸ Recording ▸ Retrospective buffer, 30 s by default; Off / 10 s / 30 s / 1 min / 2 min). ⌥⌘R (Capture Last Take) turns that buffer into clips on their tracks as if you had been recording — audio and MIDI alike. It needs an input routed to a track; if nothing has been heard, or the buffer is off, the status bar says why.

Recorded audio is written to the project's recordings/ folder as <track>_<take>.wav; when you stop, the chosen take is registered as the track's stem. Zammoth also runs a quick silence check on every finished take — if the head (or tail) of the take is silent it says so in the status bar ("check the input + gain", or "did the input device disconnect mid-take?") instead of letting a dead take slip by.

Recorded file options (Preferences ▸ Recording): format WAV/AIFF/FLAC (default WAV), bit depth 16/24/32-float (default 24-bit), and the Latency offset — a ±200 ms manual trim that nudges recorded audio against the grid, shown next to the driver's own measured round-trip latency so you're trimming from a real number.

MIDI recording uses the same arm/record path and lands as a MIDI clip; quantise is applied afterwards (⌘U or the clip menu), never destructively at capture.

If the audio device changes mid-take (unplugged interface, a Bluetooth renegotiation), the take in progress is discarded — the engine must rebuild its graph — and Zammoth posts a durable chat message saying exactly that, so it never looks like a mystery.

Anything Zammoth itself would do that throws a take away is refused while you record, with "stop recording first": opening audio inputs for the first time (arming an audio track during a MIDI take), pairing or re-pairing inputs (Configure…), changing a track's audio input, and deleting a track. The engineer gets the same answer.

Takes and comping

See the Clips chapter: Show takes (N) expands the take rows, click selects a take, drag across a row comps that region, drag seams to move comp boundaries, and the agent can flatten a finished comp or discard unused takes on request.

Recording into the Loop Deck

Three session-style paths, separate from arrangement recording:

• Record into one pad — right-click an empty pad ▸ Record N bars into this slot (N follows the loop-length grid; Free rolls until you stop). The track's input punches in, records N bars, and the new loop starts playing in the pad.
• launcher.record — session record: every armed track records into its next empty pad, one new slot clip per take.
• ⏺ CAPTURE (the deck header key) — arm a jam; when you disarm, everything you launched is printed into the arrangement as real clips, in one undo step.

Only one take rolls at a time: asking for a second while one is recording is refused rather than silently replacing it. If you quit or switch edits while a take is still rolling, the take is stopped and landed first, and counts as an unsaved change — so the save prompt you get is the one that keeps it.

The metronome

Zammoth's click is its own device — always in sync with the tempo map and time-signature changes, with real subdivisions:

• On/off — the transport glyph or O.
• Rhythm — auto (one click per beat), bar (downbeats only), 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and triplet variants of each.
• Sound — classic, click, or wood (synthesised, perfectly deterministic).
• Only while recording — the click can be limited to takes.
• Count-in — 0/1/2 bars (shared with the record path).
• The downbeat always gets the accented click. All of this is in the metronome's right-click menu and in Preferences ▸ Recording ▸ Metronome.