Settings Reference

Every setting Aether remembers and its default, from Pro Mode and reasoning effort to MIDI channels, post-processing, and crash reporting.

DocumentationSettings Reference

Reference

Settings Reference

Every setting Aether remembers, and what it is set to before you touch anything. Open Settings with the gear icon or Cmd + , (Ctrl + , on Windows). The tabs are General, MIDI, System Prompt, License, and About.

Settings are global: they apply to every project and every format on that machine. The two exceptions are noted below, and both are saved into your DAW project instead.

Batch generation is deliberately not on this page. It is a send mode rather than a setting: it starts off every time Aether loads and is never carried over from your last session, so a batch you ran on Friday cannot quietly multiply Monday's requests. See Batch Generation under Advanced Generation.

Generation

The General tab of Aether's Settings panel. The tab strip reads General, MIDI, System Prompt, License and About. The tab holds the provider and model selectors, Reasoning Effort, the masked API key with Test Key and Refresh Model List, a temperature override, and on the right the MIDI preview channel, the Show AI reasoning toggle, the library save location (its path blacked out here), and the crash reporting toggle. — Settings, General. A Show Tutorial button sits along the bottom of every tab.

Setting	Default	Notes
Pro Mode	Off	Plans in a first pass, then generates from that plan. Two API calls per generation instead of one. One setting, shared by the Melodic and Drums tabs.
Show AI reasoning in chat	On	Shows the Thought panel above a result. Display only; it does not change what is generated.
Reasoning effort	Medium	Saved per provider, and only shown for models that support it. Low, Medium, or High.
Temperature override	Off	Per provider. When on, pins creativity to a fixed value between 0.0 and 1.0 instead of Aether's default.

Post-processing (the Enhance gear)

These are the Enhance stages. Clean and Raw ignore them; only Enhance applies them.

Setting	Default	Notes
Processing mode	Clean	Raw, Clean, or Enhance. Clean is safety fixes only.
Quantize	On, full strength	Snaps to the grid the style works on.
Velocity shaping	On, half intensity	Pulls extreme velocities toward a natural range.
Humanize	On, half amount	Subtle timing offsets. Deterministic, so it does not re-roll.
Fix dissonance	Off	Off by default because it rewrites notes rather than fixing errors.

MIDI

Setting	Default	Notes
Output mode	Multi-track	Multi-track writes one named track per layer; Combined puts everything on one channel.
Output channel	1	Used by Combined mode and by clips with no separate layers.
Input channel	All	Filters incoming MIDI for live capture.
Bass channel	1	Starting channel for the first bass layer.
Harmony channel	2	Starting channel for the first harmony layer.
Lead channel	3	Starting channel for the first lead layer.
GM program changes in exports	Off	Off so an export cannot change an instrument you already loaded. Turn on when exporting for a General MIDI player.
Lock to Host	Off	Syncs BPM and time signature from your DAW, and re-times the loaded clip to match. Hidden in Standalone.

Per-layer channels are not here

The channel on an individual layer is set in the Layers panel and saved with your project, not globally. The settings above only decide where layers start out. See MIDI Routing for how the two interact.

System prompts

Setting	Default	Notes
Prompt library	Empty	Your named style prompts. Global, so every project sees the same set.
Active prompt	None	Saved per project, not globally. With none active, Aether uses its default behavior.
Name length	Up to 80 characters
Body length	Up to 100,000 characters

Providers and models

Setting	Default	Notes
API keys	None	Stored in your operating system's credential store, never in the settings file.
Selected model	Per provider	Each provider remembers the model you last used with it.
Custom model ID	None	OpenRouter and Hugging Face only, for a model not in the list.
OpenRouter provider filter	Show all	Ticks which upstream providers appear in the model list.
Local server URL	localhost:11434 (Ollama), localhost:1234 (LM Studio)	Point Aether at a local model server.

Files and privacy

Setting	Default	Notes
Library save location	See Files & Folders	Where generated clips are written.
Crash and diagnostic reports	Off	Opt-in. Off means nothing is uploaded.
Tutorial	Shown once on first launch	Replay it any time from the help control on the tab bar, or from Settings.

License

The License tab shows your activation status and your license key, masked. It also carries Deactivate This Machine, which frees this machine's slot without going to your account page, and a countdown if you have been offline long enough to be in the grace window. See Activation & Licensing.

Resetting

There is no reset button. To return to the defaults above, quit Aether and delete the settings file listed in Files & Folders. Your library and your API keys are stored separately and are not affected.