Importing & Editing Your Own MIDI
Bring your own MIDI into Aether and ask it to extend, reharmonize, restyle or write parts around it. Reference slots, editing chips, and what import leaves out.
DocumentationImporting Your Own MIDI
Your Material
Importing & Editing Your Own MIDI
Aether is not only for starting from nothing. Bring in a loop you already have, a progression from another session, or a part someone sent you, and ask Aether to extend it, reharmonize it, restyle it, or write new parts around it. Everything in Chat-Based Generation applies; the difference is that the conversation starts from your material rather than a blank page.
Four ways to bring MIDI in
| How | Where it lands | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Drop a file onto the chat panel | Attached to your next message as a reference | Asking the AI to work from it |
| Drop a file anywhere else in the window | The piano roll, and saved to your library | Auditioning it and keeping it |
| The Import button on the parameter toolbar | The piano roll, and saved to your library | The same, from a file chooser |
| Add to Chat on a library clip | The chat and the transport together | Picking an earlier idea back up |
Aether reads .mid and .midi files. Watch which panel you drop onto: the chat panel attaches the file to your next message, while the rest of the window imports it. The drag overlay tells you which one you are about to get.
You can also play a part in rather than importing it. See MIDI Library & Capture for recording from a controller.
References: attaching your own material
Files dropped on the chat panel become references, and you can attach up to three at once. The AI receives their full note data, not a summary, so it can work with the actual voicings and rhythms rather than a description of them.
- ●Three slots. Dropping again fills the free ones rather than replacing what is there, and Aether tells you if a file did not fit.
- ●A multi-track file counts as one reference and keeps its parts, so a four-part arrangement does not use up all three slots.
- ●References are used by the next message you send, then cleared. That keeps a later request in the same chat from silently dragging an old file along with it.
- ●Clear MIDI, next to New and Redo, detaches everything before you send if you change your mind.
- ●A file that declares its own tempo keeps it. One that does not is read at your session tempo, which is what most DAW clip exports need.
Your key and tempo come with the file
Importing tells Aether more than the notes. It reads the key and tempo from what you drop and fills in the Key, Scale and BPM controls, highlighting them so you can see the values came from the file, and the chat says which ones it took. Those controls are what actually hold a generation to a key and a tempo, so a variation on your own song stays in it. Change any of them and your choice wins. Material with no clear key is left on Any key rather than pinned to a guess.Tracks keep their names
A multi-track file arrives as named parts rather than one merged block of notes, so you can ask for something that refers to one of them: an alternative guitar idea over the existing harmony works because the guitar is identifiable in what the AI receives. Track names come from the file, so name your tracks in your DAW before exporting.Why references clear after sending
A reference is an attachment to one message, not a setting. If they persisted, the fifth message in a long conversation would still be carrying the file you dropped at the start, which is rarely what you meant and quietly costs you tokens on every request.What to ask for
Once your material is attached or loaded, describe the change in plain language. These all work:
- ●"Combine these two patterns into one part" with two references attached
- ●"Add a walking bassline under this"
- ●"Reharmonize this with jazz voicings, keep the melody"
- ●"Extend this to 16 bars and build the energy"
- ●"Make this feel like a bossa nova"
- ●"Simplify this, there are too many notes"
- ●"Put an ostinato under the piano"
The parameter panel changes when MIDI is loaded
With a clip in the piano roll, Quick Params switches from generation controls to editing ones: Action chips (Enhance, Add layers, Extend, Simplify, Reharmonize, Humanize, Combine MIDI) and Restyle chips (Jazzy, Darker, Swing, Sparse, Lush and more). They are multi-select, so you can stack directives, and they save you typing the same instruction repeatedly. See Smart Controls.Attaching keeps your parts, loading flattens them
The two routes in the table above treat a multi-track file differently, and it is worth knowing which you want before you drop it.
| Attach to chat | Load into the piano roll | |
|---|---|---|
| How | Drop onto the chat panel | Import button, or drop anywhere else |
| What the AI sees | Each track kept apart, with its name | Not sent unless you attach it |
| What you hear and export | Nothing until you generate | All tracks merged into one part |
| Ask for a specific part | Yes, by track name | No, the parts are already merged |
So if your arrangement has a bass, a piano and a horn line and you want to say write an alternative horn line over the existing harmony, attach it to the chat. Loading it into the piano roll is for auditioning and keeping, and it gives you one part rather than three.
Clips from your own Aether library reload with their layers intact either way, because Aether stores the layer information alongside the file rather than relying on the .mid to carry it.
Polishing what you imported
The Raw / Clean / Enhance control works on imported material exactly as it does on a generation, so you can quantize, shape velocities, or humanize a part that came from somewhere else.
Enhance will not rewrite your chords
When you ask Aether to Enhance an imported clip, it checks that the result still follows the progression you started with, and runs a corrective pass if the harmony drifted. That check exists precisely because polishing someone else's material should not quietly change it. See Piano Roll & Post-Processing.Limits and failures
- ●Only .mid and .midi files. Audio, project files, and other formats are not read.
- ●A file Aether cannot parse reports "Failed to import MIDI file" and nothing is loaded.
- ●Generations are capped at 10,000 notes, which is far beyond a normal arrangement but worth knowing if you import something enormous.
- ●One key and one tempo per clip, so a file with tempo or key changes partway through will not survive them.
Questions