Signals & Sorcery

sorceress

Core Features

Define a musical contract and generate within those constraints:

Lay your scenes out as a full song, by hand, without leaving the app:

Compose on top, arrange at the bottom: drop scenes onto a horizontal timeline, repeat them, and reorder them
Copies and linked copies: edit one chorus and every linked chorus follows
Paint layers bar by bar, including layers borrowed from other scenes, which keep their own scene's bus
Your real mix: faders, pan and panel bus effects stay live while the song plays; only sound changes re-render

All built-in panels run on the Plugin SDK. These are on by default:

Drums - Drum-pattern MIDI with a built-in sample-based drum sampler
Instruments - Pitched, polyphonic sample-based instruments
Synths - MIDI generation played through Surge XT or any VST3/AU instrument
Bass - One monophonic bassline from your description
Ensemble - Two to six voices written together, for Strings, Horns or Winds
Arpeggiator - A repeating arp pattern designed from your description
Pads - The scene's chords voiced as sustained pads that rotate across Surge XT patches
Loops - Audio loop and sample browser with time-stretching and effects

Turn these on in the plugins panel when you want them:

Stems - Audio from text prompts, with optional stem splitting
Chat - An assistant that builds and edits your scene from plain-language requests
Recorder - Loop-aware microphone recording
Animate - Movement over time: pumper, autopan, tremolo, trance gate, filter sweeps, risers, ducking and more
Mix Assets - A palette of hits, risers and shots
Text2Voice - Paste some text and hear it sung over your scene
Freesound - Sounds from freesound.org that match the scene's key and BPM
Synth V - Vocal lines sung through Synthesizer V Studio 2 Pro (needs Synth V and an installed voice)

Upcoming plugin integrations: Splice, ElevenLabs, live coding, and agentic prompting.

One stereo output for everything: built-in audio, headphones or any interface
Follows your system output device, or stays on the one you choose
Pick the channel pair on multi-output interfaces, and set the buffer size
Master FX for your monitoring (room correction, headphone virtualization), never printed to exports

Surge XT ships as the default synth with bundled presets
Any VST3/AU instrument can be loaded per track via the instrument selector
The synth generator picks appropriate Surge XT patches based on sound descriptions
Custom instruments preserve their state across scenes and project save/load

Free up CPU by turning a track's instrument and effects into audio:

The track ❄ on a track row renders that track to a stem and plays it instead of the live instrument. Your mixer (volume, pan, mute, solo) stays live. Click it again to unfreeze.
The scene ❄ in the scene list freezes every track in that scene, and Freeze ALL (the ❄ in the Scenes title bar) freezes the whole project. While a batch runs, their counts tick up one track at a time (0/7, 1/7 … 7/7).
Tracks with an instrument (MIDI tracks) can freeze; audio tracks such as loops and stems can't.
Change a frozen track's sound and it unfreezes itself so you hear the edit; a note tells you why. Unfreezing brings back the instrument and effects exactly as they were, including each plugin's Dry/Wet setting.
Changed an instrument inside its own plugin window? The app can't see that, so use ↻ Force re-render stem in the track's drawer.
Playback stops while a stem renders.

Import your own sample libraries — drop your WAV drum kits and instrument samples into the drum and instrument generators; they sit alongside (or replace) the factory packs and feed generation and shuffle automatically
Load your own instrument plugins — put any VST3/AU synth or sampler on a synth track
Imports are kept separate from shipped packs, copied safely, and easy to back up

Organize your music into scenes: