Shawm for macOS

Play loud.
Change your mind.

A native Mac studio where every edit is a branch you can go back to, every plug-in runs safely in its own process, and every part of a session can be read and driven live.

See the studio Press kit

Coming to macOSAudio Units, VST3 and CLAPBy Artatura

The Shawm mark: a silver S whose tail opens into the bell of a shawm, its mouth glowing ultramarine

The studio

Everything in one calm window.

Arrangement, mixer, editor, instruments and library share one window that stays smooth with heavy projects, and every change you make there is a step you can name, undo or branch from.

The Shawm studio: drums, keys and bass in the arrangement, with the mixer below

Built differently

Nothing is lost. Nothing breaks. Nothing clicks.

Every take of every idea

Undo never throws anything away. Change course after undoing and Shawm starts a branch; the History map shows every path, checkpoints name the good ones, and it all saves with the project.

Plug-ins can’t take you down

Each plug-in runs in a process of its own. If one crashes, its sound fades out and it reloads with its settings while the song plays on. Loading one never freezes the screen.

Nothing audible jumps

Starting, stopping, looping, seeking, editing under the playhead, swapping plug-ins, switching outputs: every one fades or crossfades. Click-free by design, and tested to stay that way.

Instruments and devices

A studio’s worth, built in.

Each one has its own interface, presets and live display, and every control can be automated.

Nyris, Shawm's synthesizer, with its three oscillators, filters and envelopes

Sable, with its fold curve, scope and low-pass gate

Prism's partials drawn as bars, with its spectrum and motion controls

The sampler with a drum loop sliced at its hits

Shawm Drums: a grid of sixteen pads and the selected pad's waveform and sound

Shawm EQ's curve with four bands over the live spectrum

Shawm Compressor's curve and its gain reduction over time

Shawm Limiter's gain reduction over time, with its meters

Shawm Reverb's decay drawn as a shape, with its controls

Shawm Delay's echoes drawn in time, with its controls

Shawm Cloud's grains placed in time, with its controls

Shawm Resonator's strings vibrating, each labelled with its note

The rest

And the parts you use every day, done properly.

The piano roll open under the arrangement, with a controller lane

Take lanes

Record over a part and every pass becomes a take; swipe across them to comp, audio and MIDI alike.

Audio that follows tempo

Warp audio to the tempo map with markers, detect a clip's tempo, quantize audio.

A piano roll with lanes

Mod wheel, sustain, pitch bend, pressure and any controller, with ramps and sliding notes.

Automation

Any parameter, in Read, Touch, Latch or Write.

Routing

Buses, sends, groups, sidechains and multi-output instruments, with delay compensation across all of it.

Parallel rendering

Tracks render side by side in the audio device's own workgroup; freeze the heavy ones.

Export

Mixdowns and stems, before or after the faders, normalized to true peak or loudness (LUFS).

A sound library

Folders, tags, keyboard navigation and previews that play in time with the song.

Play anywhere

Trackpad pads, Caps Lock musical typing and any MIDI controller.

Every format

Audio Units, VST3 and CLAP: effects, instruments and note effects, with their presets.

Safe by default

Autosave with crash recovery; projects keep their audio inside them.

Native

A C++20 engine and a Swift interface, made for the Mac. Requires macOS 14 or later.

Live API

Open to your tools.

Scripts, control surfaces and AI agents on your Mac can see the open project and change it, through the same commands as the interface and into the same history.

You decide who. Each new client asks once; you can revoke it any time.
Undoable. An agent’s changes are history steps, marked with its name.
Live. Subscribe to state, transport and meters as they change.

// JSON-RPC 2.0, one object per line, over a local socket
→ {"method": "hello", "params": {"client": "mix-assistant"}}

→ {"method": "batch", "params": {
    "label": "Tame the drums",
    "calls": [
      {"method": "track.update", "params": {"id": "track-drums", "gainDb": -3}},
      {"method": "track.update", "params": {"id": "track-keys", "pan": -0.2}}
    ]
}}

// one undo step, named “Tame the drums”, marked mix-assistant

Themes

Four looks. One of them is pitch black.

Ultramarine, Pitch Black, Playful and Daylight. Plug-in windows follow along.

The Shawm studio in the Ultramarine theme

The Shawm studio in the Pitch Black theme

Shawm is coming to the Mac.

Made by Artatura. Named for the shawm, the loud reed instrument that played outdoors for centuries before the oboe tamed it.

Play loud.Change your mind.