The flagship
Concertus
The modern classical-music DAW.
The full Continuo recorder, plus editing, mixing, and mastering built around how classical music production actually flows.
Coming
January 5, 2027
Not a general tool, bent toward classical. Built for it, from the first line of code.
The tools most engineers reach for were designed to do everything — pop, podcasting, sound design, whatever the feature list demanded — then get customized toward classical work with plugins and workarounds. Concertus was designed to do one thing: capture and deliver a classical performance, on classical terms.
That shows up everywhere, not just in a marketing line. The take library thinks in movements, not loops. The editor reasons about a performance's continuity, not a beat grid. The panning model measures a real microphone array's geometry, because that is how classical engineers actually hear a room. None of it was added to check a box. All of it exists because a classical session needs it.
The prime directive
Nothing may ever compromise the recording.
Not a plugin, not a meter, not a mixer move, not a crash in the interface. Monitoring is isolated so completely that if a feature fails, the take is byte-for-byte identical to what it would have been with that feature switched off.
Once a take is finalized, it is immutable forever. Everything downstream (editing, mixing, mastering) is non-destructive by construction. There is no code path that can alter a recorded file.
On the real-time audio path there is no allocation, no locking, no blocking, and no logging. That is not a policy: an automated gate must first prove it can detect a violation before any pass is believed.
Record
The recorder is Continuo.
Concertus contains the full Continuo recorder. The identical code, not a copy. Sessions recorded in either application open in the other.
The same recorder an operator trusts at the downbeat is the one inside the DAW at the mix.
Journaled recording
Kill the power mid-take and the file rebuilds from its journal to the last durable frame, byte-exact.
Zero-gap take splitting
One key closes the current take and opens the next between two samples. The device never stops.
Up to 192 tracks, 24-bit
At every professional rate your interface supports, 44.1 to 192 kHz.
Edit
Editing that thinks in takes.
Take-based editing built for classical sources, proven over years of real classical post work.
Four-point thinking, not loop-pasting: source material and destination timeline, with edits that respect musical continuity.
Sources, then destinations
The Sources page decides which takes make the session and in what order. Change your mind and every clip is re-addressed in every version of the edit; a change that would break an edit is refused with the reason rather than applied. Audio recorded elsewhere comes in as an ordinary take, copied exactly when the rate, depth and channel count match.
Versions of the edit
Keep several complete versions side by side, each with its own timeline, markers, in and out range, and mix. Switch, duplicate or rename them from the lane badge, and tell Deliver which one it is delivering.
The fade editor
Every edit point's crossfade, visually, with the audio around it. Solo one lane and hear its raw audio straight through to find where the cut belongs; preview the crossfade with pre-roll and post-roll; drag the edit point itself without moving the material either side. Level regions match levels across a join, envelopes fan out per channel, and a spectrogram can replace the waveform when you are hunting a click rather than a phrase. With the January release a level region can also carry a low shelf, a peak and a high shelf, fading in and out with the region itself, for the edits where the mismatch is tone rather than level.
Non-destructive always
Edits reference the immutable takes. Nothing is ever rendered over your source.
Surgical repairs
Send a selection to iZotope RX or CEDAR as a 32-bit float polywave and the repair splices back in, marked with a green wash so you can see what was touched. Time Stretch changes a range\u2019s length from \u221225% to +33%, offline at full quality, written as a new file. The takes are never altered.
Clip gain, live
Right-click a clip for a floating gain fader, plus or minus 24 dB with an exact dB field, that takes effect while the transport keeps running.
The edit is a document
Editing is saved deliberately, with Command S and Revert to Saved, and sixty-four levels of undo behind you. Unsaved work is autosaved beside the edit, and a recovery question on opening stays there until you answer it. Recording needs none of this: the recorder\u2019s own persistence is untouched, and an unsaved experiment is never committed for you.
Fast under the hands
Single-letter keys on Edit, Fade Edit and Mix, all remappable, and a scroll direction that matches the rest of your Mac.
The take map
Every attempt, lined up.
Arriving with the January release. Concertus reads the session in the background and lays out one row for every attempt at every piece the orchestra played more than once, warped so the same musical moment sits in the same place in every row. Reading only. No take is ever altered.
Hear the same bar in every take
Hold H over a row and that take plays from the moment under the pointer. Move to the row below and hear the same bar in the next attempt. Let go and it stops. No clicking, no space bar, no transport.
Recognise a passage by its colour
Rows are tinted by where each moment’s sound sits, low reds through to high blues, stretched over the session’s own range, so a passage is recognisable by colour as much as by shape. Material already in your edit is shaded gold, and anything the piece plays twice is flagged on the ruler.
Named the way you already talk
Attempts are named as an editor names them: 79-3 is the third attempt at take 79. Mark a couple of bars and the ruler numbers the rest, so take 79, bar 57 becomes a place you can go to. A score PDF can live in the project. A note that could mean two places is refused with both named rather than guessed.
Put the weak ones out of sight
Right-click to hide an attempt, or every attempt of a take. Hidden rows leave the map and the count stays visible. Nothing is deleted, no take is touched, and the choice is saved with the edit.
Talk never joins the music
While the map is built, the Mac’s own sound classifier marks where someone is talking so a spoken word can never begin or join a piece. It runs on the Mac, with nothing downloaded and nothing sent anywhere, and it only says talk when it is sure.
See whether two takes line up
In the fade editor, Overlay draws each lane’s partner faintly over it, the incoming take in orange across the outgoing and the outgoing in blue across the incoming, on one time axis, so you can judge an edit before you commit to it.
Mix
Panning with Physics aka ChronoPan
A 64-bit double-precision summing engine, and a panner that knows where your microphones stood.
ChronoPan™ models your actual microphone array: its spacing, its geometry. Concertus auto-measures the array's real timing from the recording itself.
Sources are placed with time-and-level panning that respects how a spaced pair actually hears. Not just a level knob.
AU plug-in hosting
Audio Units only, by choice. Per-channel inserts, up to four sends to return strips beside the master, and master-bus inserts. Version 3 plug-ins run in their own process, so one that crashes takes nothing with it. Bypass is true bypass with latency held, and every channel is delayed to match the one carrying the most plug-in latency.
The console law
Constant-power pan, locked fader groups, a +12 dB calibrated boost zone, and professional meter ballistics. The same law everywhere.
Automation that follows the edit
With the January release, fader level becomes a line through keyframes, drawn in a lane under each track with its waveform behind it, and saved with that version of the edit. One law drives playback and every render, so a master holds exactly what you heard. Cut, move or trim the material underneath and the automation goes with it: what survives keeps its level, what you remove takes its keyframes with it, new material gets a straight line. One undo restores the edit and its automation together. Pan automation follows.
DAC rate ownership
Concertus asserts the output rate only while it is the frontmost application, then hands the device back gracefully. The way the best-behaved hosts do.
Two engines, on purpose
Two summing engines. Zero apologies.
Hearing your session and mixing your record are different jobs with opposite requirements. We drew the line where the physics draws it.
The cue path
For the moment that cannot be interrupted.
- Lean float32 summing with constant-power panning, living in the same verified real-time core as the recorder itself.
- No allocation, no locks, no surprises on the audio thread, enforced by the same machine gate that polices capture.
- It will never host a plugin, never buffer ahead, never grow a feature that could wedge a callback. That refusal is the feature.
The mix bus
For the record you will put your name on.
- 64-bit double-precision summing end to end, with bit-exactness proofs in the automated test suite.
- AU inserts, sends and returns, master-bus processing, and ChronoPan™ placement by physics.
- Deliberately off the real-time callback, rendered ahead and buffered, feeding the bounce path with proper dithering.
Does any of this machinery risk the take? Three levels of no. While recording, monitoring is a sealed tap that can only drop itself, never the file. Capture in Concertus is the identical shared core as Continuo's, and a device-ownership arbiter keeps the two engines from ever fighting over hardware. The mix page could crash outright without touching a rolling take.
One engine for the red light. One for the record. A wall between them.
Assistants
Say what you want done.
Arriving with the January release. Two separate things, and the difference between them matters.
On the Mac
The sidebar. Nothing leaves.
A sidebar opens beside every editing page. Ask in plain words and Concertus does it: play or go to a take at a bar, add or replace a stretch in the edit, mark a bar, hide takes, find takes. Several steps run in order, and the first refusal stops the rest.
It runs on the Mac\u2019s own model, so nothing you type or it reads leaves the machine. The model only fills in a form of fixed actions, and ordinary code holds it to what you actually wrote: it never guesses a take you did not name. Every change it makes is one undo step.
Needs macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence.
Or your own
Claude Code and Codex.
Switch assistants on and Claude Code or Codex can read the open project, work through an editor\u2019s notes, fill the album card, reorder the disc, and ask for the DDP to be built. It connects through a private channel that exists only on this Mac, for your own account, with no network port open.
It is off until you turn it on, and every project asks before an assistant may touch it. Nothing is read or changed while a take is recording. Changes land only in the open version of the edit, each as one undo step, each logged. A DDP always shows you the summary and waits for you to press Build. Your recordings are never touched, and a badge shows while an assistant is connected, with Disconnect beside it.
One difference worth being clear about: an outside assistant runs outside Concertus, so what it reads of your project it may send on to its own service. That is exactly why it stays off until you ask for it.
Either one can also build the project for you: point it at a folder of recordings and it brings them in as takes and runs Find Takes. A sheet names every file and the total size first, and nothing is copied until you press Import.
Deliver
A master a label can accept.
Not an export menu. A page that assembles the disc, measures it, writes it, and then reads back what it wrote before it tells you it is ready.
- Album Publish
- The markers you dropped while editing become the disc’s tracks, snapped to the CD frame of a seventy-fifth of a second, and every shift is reported rather than silent. Titles and an ISRC per track, album title, performer and UPC checked as you type. Warnings while there is still time to act: a track under four seconds, more than ninety-nine of them, a programme past 79:57, a duplicate ISRC. The album is a document in the project, so every deliverable reads one copy of the codes.
- Create DDP
- A Red Book master: the whole edit rendered through the full mix to 44.1 kHz and 16 bits with TPDF dither, written as a DDP 2.00 fileset with the two-second lead-in pause, its PQ sheet, CD-Text and checksums. Then Concertus reads the whole thing back — structure, sizes, PQ timings, CD-Text, every checksum — before it will say DDP ready. If it cannot, it says validation failed and keeps the folder for you to look at. A plug-in tail that runs past the end extends the last track to hold it.
- CD-Text, metered
- CD-Text lives in one 256-pack block, and the card meters it as you type: amber from ninety percent, red when you are over. Nothing is trimmed on your behalf. An over-budget album is refused, not quietly truncated.
- Loudness and true peak
- Integrated LUFS to BS.1770-4, loudness range and true peak, for the album and for every track, with a true peak above −0.3 dBTP flagged and the clipped samples of the sixteen-bit image counted. Measure only reports. Nothing is limited, and nothing is normalised without you.
- Digital Delivery
- One render, cut on the same boundaries as the disc, as WAV and FLAC at sixteen or twenty-four bits, at the session rate or anything from 44.1 to 192 kHz. Per track, or one continuous file with a cue sheet, or both. Titles and tags embedded, cover art in the FLACs, file names following tokens you set. The folder carries a manifest and a SHA-256 checksum file a label can verify, and anything past four gigabytes is written as RF64.
- Paste Label Info
- Arriving with the January release, and needing macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence. Paste a label’s email or metadata sheet and Concertus reads it on the Mac, sending nothing anywhere, then shows you everything before a single field changes: problems first, every album and track change old against new, the label’s running order and how each track was matched, and anything they asked for that Concertus has no field to hold. Codes are accepted only where they appear in the text exactly as written, and one it cannot place is named for you to type rather than guessed. Apply is all or nothing, and one undo step.
- Track Order
- Arriving with the January release. Drag the disc’s tracks into the label’s running order and the audio genuinely moves, carrying each track’s fades, gain and markers, while the pause before a place and the crossfade at a join stay with the place on the disc rather than with the music. One undo step, and refused outright if a track would start inside a crossfade.
- Mix Down and stems
- A stereo mix as WAV, Broadcast Wave, AIFF or M4A, or every track as Broadcast Wave stems — one polywave, or a file each. From the edited timeline or the whole session, between IN and OUT or end to end, at any rate from 44.1 to 192 kHz with your choice of linear or minimum phase conversion. Plug-in tails ring out, and pipeline latency is compensated.
Availability
Where it runs.
Concertus for macOS
January 5, 2027Apple silicon, on macOS 12 Monterey or later.
Continuo and Concertus open each other's projects.
Coming
January 5, 2027
Until then, Continuo is shipping today — the same recorder that sits at the heart of Concertus.