The recorder
Continuo
The recorder you point at the downbeat and trust.
The mission-critical multitrack recorder for classical music recording, from orchestral and choral sessions to chamber and soloist dates. Deterministic by design, stable by proof, built on one belief: the take is sacred.
The prime directive
Nothing may ever compromise the recording.
Not a plugin. Not a meter. Not a mixer move or a crash in the interface. On the real-time audio path there is no allocation, no locking, no blocking, no logging.
Machine enforced
An automated allocation gate polices the real-time code, and it must first prove it can detect a violation before any pass is believed.
Monitoring, isolated
Every meter and monitor feature is isolated, so the recorded take is byte-for-byte identical whether it was on or off.
Capture integrity
One performance, one chance.
Capture is the heart of Continuo, and none of it is taken on faith. Every behavior here is enforced by tests built to break it.
Kill the power. Keep the take.
Every take is written beside an ordered checkpoint journal, and audio is durable on disk before the journal ever claims it.
If power dies mid-take, the file rebuilds from its journal to the exact last durable frame. We prove it by destroying files on purpose and requiring byte-identical rebuilds.
A lock-free capture path
Audio moves from the interface through a lock-free ring buffer to a dedicated writer thread. The real-time thread never waits on anything.
Split takes with zero gap
One key closes the current take and opens the next between two samples. The device never stops. Nothing is missed.
Honest failure reporting
A device change, a dropped buffer, a finalize error: every fault is reported, and the journal records the truth. A degraded take can never masquerade as clean.
The crash sentinel
An unclean shutdown is detected on the next launch, and recovery is offered before anything else happens.
A full disk seals the take
If the drive fills or stops accepting writes, the take is held for up to ten seconds and then finalized rather than left spinning. Free space is watched as you record, and a project drive that disappears raises an alert.
The dead-mic check
On any take of thirty seconds or more, a channel that stayed below −70 dBFS while another reached −50 dBFS is named afterwards as a possible dead microphone. When a take ends with anything else worth knowing, the report says so in words.
The Mac stays awake
While Continuo is open the screen does not dim, sleep, or lock, and during a take idle sleep is always prevented. A sleep the app cannot stop, like closing the lid, is written to the log.
192
Tracks, maximum
24-bit
Capture depth
44.1 to 192 kHz
Sample rates
Every professional sample rate your interface supports.
After the fact
Prove the session is whole.
Crash recovery is not something you hope happened. You can ask, take by take, and you can carry a copy away that has checked itself.
Verify Take
Check one take or every take in the session: headers and sizes, read from the files themselves. A take another application has added its own cache to still verifies as intact.
Repair from Journal
A take that never finished — power loss, a crash — is offered for repair. Every frame the journal can prove is kept; audio it cannot prove is moved to a salvage file beside the take rather than folded in quietly. The result says which it was: repaired lossless, or repaired with losses.
Session Backup
Copy the whole project to another drive, then read every file back and check it against a checksum, with a manifest of every file’s SHA-256 written alongside. It never touches the original, refuses to start during a take, and cancels itself if one begins.
Interchange
Files other tools love.
A recorder earns its place by what it hands to the rest of the chain. Continuo writes Broadcast Wave files the way downstream tools expect them.
Beyond the 4 GB limit
RF64/BWF polywave carries a long take straight past the 4 GB WAV limit. No broken files, no special handling.
TimeReference on every take
A full bext chunk is written on every take, splits included, so a DAW places each file on its timeline automatically.
iXML, verified against Pyramix
Written the way Pyramix writes it: same encoding, same track-name convention, checked against Pyramix's own exports. Continuo takes drop into a Pyramix session and just work.
Metadata ahead of the audio
Headers, bext, and iXML live in a fixed region at the head of the file, where readers expect them. Never appended after gigabytes of audio.
Take names that travel
An optional session label folds into every filename (001 Gary Levinson.wav), validated against a strict filename grammar, so a name survives the hand-off to Pyramix, REAPER, or Logic.
The hand-off
Record here. Open it there.
Export builds a project file beside your takes. Copy the folder to the other machine, open that file, and the session is already assembled — tracks named, faders and pans set, colours intact.
Pyramix
The complete hand-off.
Track names, faders, pans and colours all arrive. So does the Take Logger — ratings and notes land as native Pyramix markers, exactly as if they had been logged there. Groups, mute, solo, automation and fades are not carried.
REAPER
Everything but the log.
Names, faders, pans and colours on every track, with a ruler marker at each take start. One mono track per channel, each playing its own channel of your original polywave — no duplicated media, up to 64 channels. Take Logger notes do not carry.
Logic Pro
Names and structure.
An AAF with your track names and every take chained down the timeline in order. Faders, pans and colours are set in Logic — deliberately, because Logic can only import them as automation rather than as faders. The AAF copies each channel to its own 24-bit mono file, so allow roughly the size of the takes again, and export after the folder is in its final place: the references are full paths. Tested with Logic Pro.
REAPER links your media by absolute path, so a folder opened somewhere new answers REAPER's own relink prompt once and then behaves.
Why record here
Thirty seconds from a cold Mac to rolling.
Boot the machine, make a project, and record — however many tracks you need. No template to load, no session to prepare, nothing to configure before the first downbeat.
Then hand the whole thing to Pyramix, REAPER or Logic with almost no effort. You get a recorder that does one job perfectly, without giving up the tool you finish in.
Nothing to arm
There is no record-enable to forget. Every track in the project is recording — the state where a take is silently missing does not exist.
No session to build first
A new project is a name and a track count. The work of laying out a session before you can capture anything is simply absent.
A rig you save once
Save an entire setup as a template: interface, rate, track count, routing, strip names, colours, groups, faders, pans, output and master. Start the next project from it, or apply it to the one already open.
Know the machine before the hall does
Test This Interface measures how many channels your interface and disk can really carry at each sample rate, in about half a minute, watching for skipped buffers. For longer proving there is a separate Test Bench for soak tests.
Nothing to check twice
No routing to verify, no arming to re-confirm before the take. What you set up is what records, every time.
The companion
Record here. Finish where you always do.
Continuo is the modern companion to Pyramix, Sequoia, REAPER, and Concertus: reliable, fast, and simple to set up for live concerts and recording sessions alike.
During the session, nothing on screen distracts you from running it. When the last take ends, the handoff to your editing and mixing room is already done.
More on how the tools fit togetherDuring the session
Ultra-modern, stable, and fast. Set up in minutes, run the session without distraction, and trust every take to the journaled recorder.
Into Pyramix
Export recordings straight into a Pyramix project: Take Logger information, markers, track names, fader levels, and pan settings travel with the audio.
Open and continue
Open the project in Pyramix and editing and mixing pick up right where the session left off. Sequoia, REAPER, and Concertus read the same Broadcast Wave and iXML files.
Signal path
Route with certainty, listen without risk.
Patching without surprises
Automatic mode patches input 1 to track 1, in order: set your track count and record. Individual mode patches any input to any track, from a menu right on the channel strip.
In-use inputs show the track that owns them, and a conflict is refused, never silently resolved. Unpatched tracks are omitted from the file entirely: it contains exactly what was armed.
Whole blocks of inputs can be recorded without patching strip by strip: ask for inputs 8 to 16 and then 24 to 32, and they are joined in that order. An input claimed twice is refused with both tracks named, and the recorded patch is logged with every take.
A mixer for your ears only
Constant-power pan, locked fader groups where the member nearest a rail stops the whole group and every offset is kept, peak-hold meters with professional ballistics and latched clip indicators, on a two-segment scale that gives the top 24 dB most of the travel, where classical dynamics actually live. Every move shapes what you hear, never the recorded file.
A monitor-only mode runs the input path with no disk writing at all, and a live waveform scrolls while you record. A Mixer/Meters switch turns the strips into a meter bridge: every track's level and clip count on one screen, with red ticks on the session waveform wherever any channel reached full scale.
Audiomovers Listento has a slot on the MASTER strip, so you can send your monitor mix to a producer anywhere in the world. It needs Listento itself installed, and it runs outside Continuo, so nothing it does can reach the take. It carries the monitor output, which means listeners hear audio only while Monitor is on.
Two engines, on purpose
An engine you cannot break.
When you are tracking, playback is a cue: you need to hear the take now, with nothing between you and the music that could possibly glitch.
So Continuo's playback runs on a purpose-built cue engine: lean float32 summing with constant-power panning, living in the same verified real-time core as the recorder itself. It will never host a plugin, never buffer ahead, never grow a feature that could wedge a callback. That refusal is the feature.
While recording, monitoring is a sealed tap beside the capture path. If it falls behind, it drops. The file does not.
The mix engine isn't disabled. It's not even compiled in.
Takes and projects
The session, kept in order.
Everything Continuo captures stays reviewable, portable, and accounted for.
The take library
- Session timeline
- Every take of the session on one strip, laid end to end. Click anywhere to locate.
- Gapless review
- Playback continues take to take without a hiccup, exactly as the session ran.
- Clipped peaks, marked
- A waveform overview marks clipped peaks in red.
- The Take Logger
- A floating panel for rating each take one to five stars and writing a note against it. A star pressed while recording also drops a timestamped marker in the take as it rolls. Ratings and notes are written in Pyramix format beside the audio, so they appear there too, and Export Report saves a PDF of every take with its rating and notes.
- Protected Reset
- Clearing takes is a two-step, typed confirmation. Even then, files move to the system Trash, never to oblivion.
Projects
- A project is a folder
- Takes, journals, settings: one folder you can copy, archive, or hand to a colleague.
- A portable project file
- Copy the folder anywhere and it is the same project. Same tracks, names, colors, groups, faders, routing. Concertus opens it too.
- Sample-rate lock
- A folder that holds takes locks its rate. No mixed-rate sessions, ever.
- A per-project black box
- Every record start, stop, split, patch, and reset is logged with timestamps. What happened at 14:32 last Tuesday is written down.
- Preflight checklist
- Input device present, recording folder writable, disk space as hours remaining at your byte rate, AC power, thermal state.
- Nothing is overwritten by accident
- A folder or file Continuo cannot read is never mistaken for a new project and never written over. Opening a recent project whose drive is unplugged says exactly that and keeps the entry. Every settings file it replaces is kept in a history folder.
- Live health readout
- CPU, disk write rate, and space remaining in the title bar. Always visible, never in the way.
Day to day
It stays out of the way.
Updates wait for the downbeat
Continuo looks for an update once, at launch, and never again until you ask. Nothing downloads until you choose Install, and if a take is rolling when an accepted update is ready it is held until you quit. The record page says so in one line.
Help that searches
132 topics, searchable offline on every macOS Continuo supports. On macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence you can type a question in your own words and get an answer built only from the closest topics, which are listed underneath so you can read them yourself. Nothing leaves the Mac.
One zip for support
Create Support Bundle gathers the logs, your settings, the environment and a project health file into a single zip to send us. It never contains audio. Every refused action tells you why it was refused.
Built for the Mac
Native to the Mac. Nothing in between.
Continuo is written for macOS and Apple Silicon, using the best technology the platform offers, with no compatibility layer between your interface and the disk.
Interface
SwiftUI, with Metal-accelerated drawing.
Audio
CoreAudio, with no abstraction layer between your interface and the disk.
Reliability core
One body of C for the code where a bug would lose a performance. For that layer, the code itself is the contract.
Reliability is not a promise, it is a test suite: hundreds of conformance cases, from file formats to fader laws to recovery behavior, compared to the byte.
Availability
Where things stand.
Continuo for macOS
Shipping. A universal binary for Apple silicon and Intel Macs, on macOS 12 Monterey or later.
Continuo and Concertus open each other’s projects.
The store
Own the recorder.
Continuo is $129, sold right here when the store opens. Your serial number will arrive by email moments after purchase. The free demo is available today: the whole application, with recording and playback stopping at one minute per pass.
Inside Concertus
The same recorder, at the mix.
Concertus contains this exact recorder: the identical code, not a copy. The recorder you trust at the downbeat is the one inside the DAW when you edit, mix, and master.