Piano Roll, Playback & Post-Processing

Audition generations in a dual-mode piano roll with chord detection, then polish with the Raw/Clean/Enhance post-processing pipeline.

DocumentationPiano Roll & Post-Processing

Visualization

Piano Roll & Playback

Every generation appears in a built-in piano roll with instant playback. You can preview, inspect, and compare your MIDI before exporting it to your DAW. No other instrument required. Playback uses Aether's bundled Headroom Piano, a sampled grand played through the sfizz SFZ engine with a reverb stage so auditions sound finished rather than dry. Because Aether also outputs MIDI, you can route generations to any instrument in your DAW instead.

Dual-Mode Visualization

●Horizontal mode: Ableton-style left-to-right piano roll with a vertical keyboard on the left edge
●Vertical mode: Synthesia-style falling notes, great for previewing melodies and chord voicings
●Toggle between modes with one click on the view switcher

Visual Features

●Velocity-driven coloring: note brightness and saturation scale with velocity using your selected accent color
●Real-time chord detection: chord names overlay the piano roll as the playhead moves (28 chord templates from power chords and triads through 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths, with inversion awareness and slash-chord notation)
●Beat grid overlay: bar lines, beat divisions, and sub-beat lines at high zoom levels
●Glowing playhead: accent-colored playhead with a soft glow effect
●Scroll to pan through time; hold Cmd (Ctrl on Windows) and scroll to zoom, from 20% to 500%
●Drag the roll to pan, and double-click to set the playback start marker. A "Playhead" pill appears when you scroll away from the playhead, and returns you to it
●Sustain pedal visualization: subtle 1px lines showing CC64 sustain events

Transport Controls

The Aether window with the piano roll filling the centre, the transport bar above it showing Play, Stop, the time readout, the playback tempo dropdown, zoom controls and the orientation toggle. — The zoom controls and the orientation toggle, highlighted. Import and Drag to DAW sit on the parameter toolbar above, not on this bar.

The transport bar sits directly under the piano roll. On a narrow panel it splits onto two rows, and narrower still the labels become icons.

●Play / Pause: start and stop playback (Space bar)
●Stop: reset to beginning (Escape)
●Time readout: position and total duration
●Playback tempo: audition at the clip's own BPM or switch to Custom and type one (20 to 999). This changes playback only, not the notes. It is disabled while Lock to Host is on
●Zoom out, zoom level, zoom in
●Orientation toggle: switch between the horizontal and vertical views. The label names the view you will get
●Raw / Clean / Enhance: how much polish is applied, covered below
●The Enhance gear: opens the Enhance settings popover
●Pin (standalone only): keeps the Aether window on top, useful while dragging into a DAW

Import and the Drag to DAW handle live on the parameter toolbar above the piano roll, alongside Loop, Host, Record and Layers.

Polish

Post-Processing

The Raw, Clean and Enhance segmented control highlighted on the transport bar, with the Enhance gear button beside it. — Raw, Clean and Enhance on the transport bar. Clean is the default.

Every generation can be heard three ways. A Raw / Clean / Enhance segmented control on the transport bar sets how much polish Aether applies, and it starts on Clean. Both the raw and the processed versions are computed the moment a generation arrives, so you can switch modes mid-playback for an instant A/B with no re-processing delay.

The Three Modes

Mode	What You Hear
Raw	The model's notes untouched, exactly as generated.
Clean	Safety fixes only: out-of-range pitches corrected and overlapping notes resolved. Always musically safe, fine to leave on.
Enhance	Everything Clean does, plus the optional musical-polish toolset below. Configure it with the gear button next to the control.

Enhance Toolset (configure with the gear)

The Enhance popover open beside the piano roll, grouping its stages under Timing and Feel (Quantize with a Strength slider, Humanize with an Amount slider), Dynamics (Velocity shaping), and Harmony (Fix dissonance, under a warning that it can rewrite your melody or chords). — The Enhance popover, with several stages switched on. It states what is always fixed regardless of setting, and flags Fix dissonance as the one that changes notes.

Each Enhance stage is independent and off by default: turn on only what you need.

Stage	Control	What It Does
Quantize	Strength	Snaps note starts and durations to the grid the style actually works on: a straight sixteenth grid for straight styles, a triplet grid for swung and compound ones. Notes already within 18ms of a grid point are left alone to preserve micro-timing, and a note further than 50ms from any grid point is treated as a deliberate placement and also left alone.
Velocity	Intensity	Applies a sigmoid contour that pulls extreme velocities toward a natural 25 to 115 range.
Humanize	Amount	Adds subtle timing offsets to perfectly-quantized notes so the part feels played rather than typed. Anything at the very start of the clip stays put. The offsets are deterministic, so the same clip humanizes the same way every time rather than re-rolling.
Fix Dissonance	On / Off	Snaps out-of-scale notes that clash (minor 2nd / major 7th) back into key. Off by default because it can rewrite a melody.

Always-On Safety (Clean & Enhance)

These run automatically in both Clean and Enhance. They fix errors, not artistic choices, so there's no toggle:

●Safety clamping: pitches constrained to the valid MIDI range (0 to 127) and velocities to 1 to 127.
●Overlap resolution: truncates an earlier note before a later note begins on the same pitch, eliminating stuck or overlapping notes. Where two notes of the same pitch start within a millisecond of each other, the earlier one is dropped.

Processing runs on each layer independently rather than on a merged stream, so polishing a busy arrangement never lets one part's notes interfere with another's.

Chord-Preservation Check

When you ask Aether to Enhance an imported MIDI clip, it verifies that the enhanced output still follows the original chord progression. If the harmony drifted too far, it automatically runs a single corrective retry, so polishing never quietly changes the chords you started with.