Get started

A Mac with Apple Silicon, on macOS 13 or later.

We test on macOS 26 and 27 (Apple's two latest operating systems). Earlier versions should work fine. If something doesn't, let us know.

Headphones or monitors you know well.

1. Open the download link from your beta email. Don't have it? Request the beta and we will send it to you.
2. Open the .dmg and drag Stereosonic MIX to Applications.
3. Open Stereosonic MIX from Applications. The first time, macOS asks if you're sure. Click Open.

With no project open, MIX starts on its welcome page.

1. Open or create the working folder. This is the project.
2. Import audio. Drawn dead until the first step is done, because importing copies files into the project's folder.

On the right stand the projects this desk has had open. ⇧⌘O brings the page back whenever you want it.

A folder. Inside it, Song.smix holds the mix, and Audio/ stands next to it holding the files. They sit outside the package on purpose, so other tools see ordinary audio files. Finished mixes land in Export/. Double-click the package to open the project.

Import copies wav and aiff files into Audio/ rather than linking to them, so the project moves and archives in one piece. One file becomes one track, and one track gets one channel strip.

⌘I

Import audio

⇧⌘O

The welcome page

The desk runs at one rate, and the first import sets it. After that a file below the rate is raised without asking, because that costs nothing. A file above it is the only case MIX stops to ask about: coming down means giving up the top of its treble, so you choose whether to convert it or leave it out.

The project's rate is written in the track list's footer, and that is also the one place it can be changed afterwards. Changing it rewrites every file, on purpose.

Every fader starts at the bottom. Nothing is playing yet, and that's the point: pull up what you want to hear, in the order you want to hear it. The mix is built, not corrected.

The audio is played straight off the disk, so a project of 130 tracks opens as fast as one of ten. Bring the whole song.

Then learn the pages and the way the desk is picked: the desk.

The mix saves itself on every change: every fader move, every band, every mute. There is no save button and no dirty star.

⌘S

Save nowNever necessary. The mix is written on every change.

The mix itself is a plain text file. You can read it, copy it, put it in version control, and it will still make sense in ten years. Earlier versions are kept inside the package, at most one every ten minutes.

There is no undo. Nothing is queued up waiting to be committed either, so the way back is a version in the package, reached through Show Package Contents in the Finder.

The desk everyone gets is Studio C. A paid licence opens Studio B, which adds the tape, the drum gate, the dirt, the mono maker, the precision EQ's bands, VCA groups, FairWarmth on the sum, the compressor and the convolver on an effect channel, and effect channels past the fourth.

It is one download and one program. The sound is the same, Studio C just has fewer tools. A Studio B mix opens and plays in Studio C with everything intact. The controls it adds are locked. Where this guide marks something Studio, it means Studio B.