Manual
What Zammoth is
Zammoth is a native Mac DAW with a resident AI audio engineer built into its core. It is a full digital audio workstation — recording, arranging, MIDI and instruments, mixing, mastering, and export — where every single feature can also be operated, read, and discussed by the agent that lives in the Engineer panel. You can mix entirely by hand, entirely by conversation, or (the way it is designed to be used) both at once.
Three ideas define the product:
Shared control. You and the agent operate the same live controls. When the agent moves a fader, adds an EQ, re-routes a track, or edits a clip, it goes through exactly the same operation your own click would — and every one of its moves lands in the same undo history as yours. The agent applies changes directly (there is no approval popup in the default mode), and you take anything back with a single Undo. The rule of thumb printed on the tin: the agent suggests, you own it.
Total awareness. The agent is never blind to a corner of the app. It continuously receives a structured snapshot of your session — tracks, clips, devices and their settings, routing, tempo and key, transport state, your current selection — plus live meter and analysis numbers. Anything you can do in the interface, the agent can do by command; anything you can see, it can read. You can ask it about any feature in this manual and it knows what you mean.
Your audio never leaves your machine. The agent reads numbers, not audio: loudness, spectrum, dynamics, masking, key, tempo — compact measurements computed locally. Audio processing, rendering, and your project files are all local. The only thing sent to the cloud is the conversation and those measurements, so the AI model can reason about your mix.
The two halves of the app
- The DAW surface — everything you would expect: an Arrangement view, a Mixer, a browser, a per-track device chain, a piano roll, a Loop Deck for launching loops, native instruments and effects, and hosting for your third-party VST3 and Audio Unit plug-ins.
- The Engineer panel — a chat with the resident engineer. It answers questions, executes one-off moves ("2 dB off the hats"), performs edits ("cut the intro to 8 bars"), and runs full iterative mixing passes toward a brief ("master this for club playback"). It can see and operate the whole DAW, and it explains what it does in plain language.
The look
Zammoth's interface is a retro-industrial hardware console: beveled rack panels, raised buttons with lit glyphs, knurled knobs with LED position dots, and green-phosphor LCD wells with scanlines. Colour is meaningful throughout:
- The accent colour (jade by default) marks interactive, lit, "on" things. Seven accent skins are available under View ▸ Skin — Jade, Lime, Cobalt, Crimson, Violet, Copper, and Steel (a neutral silver) — and switch live.
- Amber is the agent. Any control the agent just touched glows amber; the playhead and transport signals are amber; the ENGINEER cell in the top bar breathes amber during a run. When you see amber, the engineer did it.
- Blue-cyan marks the loop range and markers. Green/in-range colouring marks values sitting inside a healthy range.
Meters likewise come in six app-wide styles (View ▸ Meters): Phosphor (the segmented house default), Solid, Blocks, Dots, Scan, and Mono. Every style keeps the same vocabulary — bright RMS body, dimmer peak extension, white peak cap, a hold line, and a red clip latch. The hold line catches a peak instantly, holds it for 1.5 s, then falls at 12 dB/s; the clip latch stays red for 3 s after the last over. Clicking any meter resets both at once.
What Zammoth is not (yet)
Zammoth is currently a macOS app; Windows and Linux ports, AAX support, ARA plug-in integration, and DAWproject interchange with other DAWs are not available. There is no Zammoth VST3/AU plug-in; Zammoth ships only as this app. (Zammoth hosts your own VST3/AU plug-ins — see Hosting Third-Party Plug-ins.)
Zammoth is a DAW for Apple silicon Macs with an AI audio engineer built in. The beta opens soon.
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