Changelog

1.3.0

Highlights

• ●Clips land in time. This was several separate faults, not one. The section editor was silently dropping the timing reference Aether sends. Some styles asked every part to sit behind the beat, which just makes a clip late. Quantize offered straight and swung grids at once, so tightening a note could change its rhythm. And Aether trusted the tempo written into each response: a clip written correctly at your project tempo but labelled with the genre's usual tempo got stretched to match the label, sometimes to twice its length.
• ●Aether checks its own work. Every generation is measured against your project's bars and beats before you see it. If the notes and the reported tempo disagree, the notes win and the label is corrected. If a clip cannot be verified, Aether says so instead of handing it over quietly. Deliberate feel is safe: a bass on the beat with keys leaning behind it is a pocket, not an error. Styles with no fixed pulse, like ambient and cinematic, are exempt.
• ●The sustain pedal works. Aether has been writing pedal markings all along and every one was discarded before it reached playback, the piano roll or an exported file. Ballads, ambient, classical and gospel lost the sustain the writing assumed. It now survives everywhere, including both kinds of drag-out.

Fixed

• ●Sections stay in time from the first bar to the last. With the section editor on, longer forms drifted further out with every section. Each section now gets its own start and end time instead of adding bar counts up.
• ●Laid-back styles feel laid-back instead of late. R&B / Neo-Soul, lo-fi and ballads put every part behind the beat at once, and nothing anchors a groove if everything moves. The bass now holds the beat while the keys and lead lean back against it.
• ●Dragging out gives you what you were hearing. Dragging a multi-part clip as separate tracks rebuilt it from the untouched original, so your Clean or Enhance settings were missing. Dragging the same clip as one track included them.
• ●Asking for a bassline no longer means asking for only a bassline. Naming a layer anywhere in your message was read as a restriction, so "drum and bass, rolling sub bassline and atmospheric pads" gave you a bass part and nothing else. "Just bass", "melody only" and "chords only" still mean what they say.
• ●Aether remembers the style you asked for. Naming a genre set it for that message only, so following up with "make the bass busier" lost the style. It now carries through a conversation until you change it.
• ●Clips are the length you asked for, and loops loop. A clip whose last note stopped before the final bar arrived in your DAW short, and loop mode waited out the last note instead of returning at the bar line. Both now follow your bar count, whether you set it in the Bars field or wrote "an 8 bar loop".
• ●Changing your project tempo no longer stutters playback. Automating tempo in your DAW made Aether rebuild and restart the clip twice a second while you were listening.
• ●Electronic styles fit the length you asked for. Trance, drum & bass, dubstep and festival each described a full arrangement with fixed section lengths, so a shorter clip squeezed that whole shape into the space available. A 32-bar trance spent half its length in breakdown with the rolling bassline missing.
• ●No more drum parts. Aether does not write drums, but nothing in its instructions said so, and drum & bass kept adding a breakbeat layer you had to delete. Styles still write around the drums you will add, which is why a trance bassline leaves the downbeat clear.
• ●Quantize snaps to the grid your music is on. It offered straight and triplet grids together, so a slightly early sixteenth could get pulled onto a triplet, changing the rhythm instead of tightening it. It now uses the one grid the style works on, and styles with no fixed pulse get the sparsest option rather than the densest.
• ●Dropped MIDI keeps its starting position. A file beginning with a bar of rest had that bar removed. Recordings you make in Aether still snap to your first note.
• ●The BPM box shows your real project tempo. With Host on, a session at 128.5 read as "128". Only the display was rounding.
• ●Trance leads hold their hook. The lead was picking up stray notes a sixteenth off the pulse, which against a rolling bassline reads as a stumble.
• ●Chord preservation works with the section editor on, clip names count bars correctly in 6/8, and changing your audio device's sample rate no longer leaves a loaded clip playing at the wrong speed.

Changed

• ●Time signature defaults to 4/4 instead of "Let AI Choose". Aether can only send its timing reference when it knows the meter, so the old default left generations without one. "Let AI Choose" is still there.
• ●UK garage's shuffle is a little tighter, and holds steady across a clip instead of varying note to note.

1.2.2

Improved

• ●Every genre now writes like itself. Each of the 16 styles carries exact note placements, velocity shapes and layering rules of its own, instead of generic advice. Trap leaves the 808 hitting alone, funk's bass and chords interlock instead of stacking, bossa uses its real two-bar comping pattern, and gospel's vamp escalates each time round.
• ●House / EDM is now Electronic, and it understands what you asked for. One setting used to cover house, techno, drum & bass, dubstep, garage and trance with a single set of festival-oriented instructions and no sense of tempo, so asking for drum & bass gave you house-speed drum & bass. Say what you want and you get it: warehouse techno stays hypnotic and hookless, liquid drum & bass rolls at 174, UK garage swings and skips, dubstep sits in half-time, trance gets its long breakdown, and asking for nothing in particular still gives you house.
• ●Sections sound like sections. A bridge or solo that previously only moved higher and louder while reusing the same rhythm is now required to change where the notes land.
• ●Quiet genres are allowed to be quiet. Ambient, lo-fi and trap were being pushed toward pop density and dynamics by rules written for pop. Those rules are now defaults a style can override, so sparse music stays sparse and a pad layer can breathe.
• ●Mood and tempo now affect the writing itself. Asking for something dark or bright, or working well outside a style's usual tempo, changes the harmony, register and note placement rather than just the description.
• ●Classical understands specific forms. Ask for a waltz, nocturne, fugue, sonata or a particular era and you get guidance for that form instead of a summary of all of them at once.

Fixed

• ●Naming a style in your prompt actually works. Genre detection was reading the message box after it had already been cleared, so free-text requests for house, drum & bass, a jazz ballad or a waltz were ignored and fell back to general songwriting. They now reach the right style.
• ●Velocity colour is visible in the piano roll again. Multi-part clips were rendering with almost no difference between soft and hard notes.
• ●Renaming a clip no longer flattens it. A renamed clip was reloading as a single merged layer and losing its version history.
• ●The playhead now plays from where you put it. After pausing, moving the playhead and pressing play was resuming from the old position.

1.2.1

Improved

• ●Generations are substantially faster. Aether now reuses the unchanging part of its instructions between requests instead of paying to re-read them every time, and lets you tell each model how long to deliberate before writing. The longer you stay in one session, the more of the work is already cached.
• ●Pro Mode is dramatically faster when editing. Asking Pro Mode to change an existing clip made its planning pass quietly write a whole arrangement and throw it away before composing the real one, so every edit did the work twice and the wasted attempt was carried into the second pass. The planning pass now plans. Edit turns finish in a fraction of the time, and the plan itself is unchanged in quality — it still studies every note of your clip.
• ●Reasoning-effort selector now appears for Gemini. The Low / Medium / High control shows for Gemini 2.5 and later. On Gemini, Low switches the model's deliberation off entirely, which is the fastest setting available; Medium stays the default, so nothing changes unless you choose it.

Fixed

• ●Pro Mode no longer stops with a "rate limit" message on fast generations. Now that a generation can finish in a couple of seconds, Pro Mode's composing pass could arrive too soon after its planning pass and be turned away by Aether's own request throttle — the plugin was rate-limiting itself. That throttle now applies only to requests you start.
• ●Clearer message when a provider returns nothing. If a model takes so long that the connection closes before it replies, Aether reported "Invalid JSON response from API", which pointed at a formatting problem that did not exist. It now says the provider returned an empty response, and suggests retrying or switching to a faster model.
• ●Saved sessions no longer carry unnecessary MIDI data. The routine that trims note data out of saved conversations was still looking for an older format and had quietly stopped matching anything, so session files were larger than intended.
• ●Adding a layer no longer sometimes merges your existing layers. When you asked to add a new layer, the existing arrangement could occasionally collapse into a single combined track instead of staying as separate layers. Edits now build on your real, named layers every time.
• ●Reasoning-effort selector now appears for Grok. The Low / Medium / High control that trades speed for depth now shows for the Grok models that support it (such as Grok 4.5), so you can dial in how hard Grok thinks before composing.
• ●Attached MIDI files now land at your project tempo. MIDI exported from Ableton Live carries no tempo information, so Aether read those clips at a fixed 120 BPM while telling the model your session tempo. A 4-bar idea dropped into a 140 BPM project came through as roughly 4.7 bars, and whatever Aether wrote back sat off the grid. Attached files now use your session tempo when the file does not specify one, and their own tempo when it does. Files that happened to be at 120 BPM were always fine and are unchanged.

1.2.0

New

• ●Compose in layers, not just Bass / Harmony / Lead. Aether now builds arrangements from any number of named, instrument-tagged parts. Ask for "a horns section" or "an ostinato under the piano" and the new layer is added alongside what you already have instead of replacing it. Each layer carries the instrument name the model chose, normalized to a General MIDI sound.
• ●Layers view. A toggle in the toolbar opens a dedicated panel listing every layer with its instrument, a mini piano-roll preview, and per-layer Solo / Mute. A header shows the detected key, tempo, and layer count, and you can flip the labels between instrument names and part roles.
• ●Named, GM-mapped MIDI export. Dragging or exporting a multi-layer clip now writes one named track per layer with the matching General MIDI program change, so your DAW loads each part onto the right instrument automatically.
• ●Drag a single layer to your DAW. Alongside the whole-clip drag, each layer has its own colored handle you can drag out on its own.
• ●Per-layer colors in the piano roll. Every layer gets its own color so overlapping parts stay readable at a glance.
• ●Layers work on every provider. Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are now asked for layered output through their own structured-output formats, so named, instrument-tagged layers come back whichever model you pick. (Older Gemini models, such as 2.0 Flash and the 1.5 family, still return the classic Bass / Harmony / Lead trio.)
• ●Custom layers get the same polish as the main parts. Note clean-up, pitch clamping, and humanization now run on every layer you create, including instrument-tagged ones, not just Bass / Harmony / Lead.
• ●GPT-5 Pro models now work. OpenAI's "pro" models (such as GPT-5.5 Pro and GPT-5.4 Pro) run on a different endpoint from the standard chat models and previously failed to generate. Aether now talks to that endpoint automatically when you pick a pro model, so they compose like any other.

Improved

• ●Reasoning-effort control now covers OpenAI, and Pro models start fast. The Low / Medium / High reasoning selector, previously Grok-only, now also appears for OpenAI's o-series and GPT-5 models (including the Pro tiers). Each provider keeps its own setting, and OpenAI reasoning models default to Medium, so GPT-5 Pro composes in a couple of minutes instead of running its default High effort for many minutes on a short idea. Turn it up when you want maximum depth.
• ●Solo reflects what you actually hear. Soloing a layer now dims the other layer buttons in the toolbar, so the top bar always shows what is currently audible.
• ●Seamless muting for overlapping layers. Muting or unmuting one layer while parts share pitches no longer briefly cuts or re-triggers the notes held by the other layers.
• ●Onboarding tutorial covers layers. The walkthrough gained dedicated steps for the layer controls and the Layers view.

Fixed

• ●Runs on macOS 11 (Big Sur) and later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. A build setting had raised Aether's minimum to the very newest macOS, so on earlier systems the standalone app would not open ("cannot use this version of the application with this version of macOS") and the plug-in failed to load in your DAW. Aether now installs and runs across supported macOS versions again.

1.1.5

New

• ●Choose which OpenRouter providers you see. OpenRouter exposes hundreds of models, so the list could be overwhelming. In Settings, a “Providers” picker lets you tick exactly which upstream providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and so on) appear in the model dropdowns, with Select all / Clear all and Save.
• ●Per-version actions in the Library. When a saved idea has multiple versions (v1, v2, v3...), each version now has its own actions menu: Add to Chat, Show in Finder, and Delete.

Improved

• ●Seamless part muting. Muting or unmuting Bass, Harmony, or Lead during playback no longer briefly doubles the other parts' notes; only the part you toggled changes.
• ●Clearer Library buttons. Action buttons now have tooltips, the redundant “Chat” and “Variation” buttons are merged into a single “Add to Chat”, and deleting a clip now asks you to confirm, since it removes the file from disk.
• ●Better onboarding tutorial. The Raw / Clean / Enhance step is easier to read, the Library and Toolbar steps now explain the action buttons and the Bass / Harmony / Lead controls, and the Settings step covers custom system prompts, temperature, and Pro Mode reasoning.

Fixed

• ●Custom system prompt text now saves. Editing a custom system prompt's name or body and then closing Aether no longer discards what you typed; any in-progress edit is committed to disk on close and restored on the next launch.
• ●Grok's model list no longer shows the code-only and multi-agent models, which are not applicable to music generation.
• ●In System Prompt settings, clicking a prompt in the list now moves the highlight to match the prompt shown in the editor.
• ●Fixed the tutorial's Enhance step, where the navigation buttons could overlap the popover and the step appeared to show twice.

1.1.4

Fixed

• ●Some models (most often Claude routed through OpenRouter) could print a large block of raw JSON into the chat instead of the usual plain-language summary, which could also make the interface feel sluggish — generation responses are now parsed cleanly no matter how the model formats them, so you only ever see the summary.
• ●The Pro Mode plan view (the “Thought” panel and the reasoning card) now shows the readable composition plan for every model — previously, models that wrap their output in code fences (most often Claude routed through OpenRouter) could display a block of raw JSON here instead of the formatted plan.

1.1.3

Improved

• ●More reliable licensing — activation and license checks now retry automatically through brief network hiccups, so an unstable connection is far less likely to cause a failed activation or a false “couldn't reach the server” message.

1.1.2

New

• ●Return to playhead — when you scroll the piano roll away from the playhead, a small “↩ Playhead” button appears so you can jump the view straight back.

Improved

• ●Smoother seek — after double-clicking to set a start point, pressing play now glides the view to the playhead instead of snapping to it instantly.

Fixed

• ●Auditioning a variation while a batch is still generating no longer cuts out when the next variation finishes.
• ●The piano-roll playhead now stays locked to what you're actually hearing after you scroll the view — previously it could drift out of sync with the audio.

1.1.1

New

• ●Automatic update notifications — Aether now checks for new versions on launch and shows a small, dismissible banner when one is available, with a direct link to download. No more missing an update.

Improved

• ●Better Grok results — reworked the composition prompting for Grok models so they produce denser, more complete parts instead of sparse or repetitive ones.

Fixed

• ●Fixed an error when using the reasoning-effort setting with Grok models that don't support it.
• ●Stopped occasional false “generation failed” messages that could appear after you cancelled or resent a request.

1.1.0

New

• ●Reasoning effort for Grok — a Low / Medium / High selector in Settings lets you trade speed for depth on Grok models that support it. It only appears when the selected model offers it.

Improved

• ●Cleaner Pro Mode — the plan and result now appear together in a single “Composition plan” card.
• ●Stronger Grok composition prompting for more musical, less generic output.

Fixed

• ●The reasoning card no longer clips its content when expanded.
• ●The reasoning card now appears in the right place — after your message, not before it.

1.0.1

New

• ●See the AI’s reasoning — Aether can now show the plan it’s working from as it composes, for both standard and Pro Mode generations. Turn it on or off with the new “Show AI reasoning” setting.
• ●Per-variation Pro Mode — when generating a batch, each variation now gets its own independent plan and composition, so the options feel more distinct.

Improved

• ●Smarter edits — mentioning a part in an edit (e.g. “make the bass busier”) now focuses on that part instead of removing the others.
• ●Tidied the interface: fixed the Quick Params clear button icon and removed a setting that no longer did anything.
• ●Hardened privacy in the reasoning view so internal planning context stays internal.

Fixed

• ●Cancelling a generation now stops cleanly, with no leftover “Planning…” spinner.
• ●Pro Mode now saves your actual prompt to history instead of its internal planning text.
• ●Windows: resolved an installer hang on reinstall, made the background helper exit automatically when your DAW closes, fixed a port conflict that could block AI requests, and corrected a packaging issue with the bundled piano instrument.

1.0.0

Highlights

• ●Generate bass, harmony, and lead parts from natural-language descriptions.
• ●Choose your AI provider (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and more) with your own API key.
• ●Chat-based workflow: ask for changes, regenerate, and refine in context.
• ●Pro Mode for a plan-then-compose approach to more deliberate results.
• ●Built-in piano-roll preview and one-drag export straight into your DAW.
• ●Save and reuse your favorite generations from the library.