When something isn’t working

Check the recorder is switched on first. The power switch sits on the INPUT door in the rail, and when the unit is off nothing is listening.

Then check the input device and channel in the INPUT drawer. If your interface has more than one input, Afinar might be listening to the one you’re not plugged into.

After that it’s the usual suspects: the cable, the gain knob on the interface itself, and phantom power if you’re using a condenser microphone.

Plug it in and it should appear on its own without restarting Afinar. If it doesn’t, the interface needs to be powered on and connected before it announces itself to macOS, so check it’s showing up in Audio MIDI Setup. Anything class-compliant works, which is nearly everything.

Monitoring has to be on, and the recorder has to be powered on for monitoring to be possible. Both live in the INPUT drawer in the rail.

Then check where your headphones are plugged in. If they’re in the Mac and your instrument is in the interface, you’ll hear the backing and not yourself. Headphones belong in the interface.

Afinar needs Screen and System Audio Recording permission to capture what’s playing in the browser. It asks the first time you record along to a web page or a video, and if you said no, macOS won’t ask again.

Open System Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Screen & System Audio Recording, and turn Afinar on. You’ll need to quit and reopen the app.

Run the recording setup again from Settings. It measures the round trip through your interface and corrects for it, and that measurement is specific to the interface you’re using. If you’ve changed interfaces since you first set up, it’s measuring the wrong one.

Not every score gets there on its own, and nothing is broken when one doesn’t. Sync the scroll by hand instead: open Manually sync the scroll… from the play menu, play the song from the top, and scroll to keep your place. One pass, the length of the song, and the score follows from then on.

If the score has no recording attached yet, Auto-scroll has nothing to follow. Add an audio file or a YouTube link first.

This one is real and nothing warns you about it. Afinar matches the sound of the recording against the bars printed on the score, and sometimes it finds a match that looks right by its own measures and is not. The badge says Synced and the score still runs ahead of the music or falls behind it.

You are not stuck. Open Setup and choose Sync the scroll yourself instead…. Playing the song through by hand overrides what Afinar worked out, and the score follows your timing from then on. If you change your mind, Use Afinar’s own timing appears in the same panel and puts it back — nothing you played is thrown away.

Sign in to YouTube inside Afinar’s browser the same way you would in Safari, and Premium works as it does anywhere else. Some videos are blocked from playing outside YouTube itself by whoever uploaded them, and there’s nothing any app can do about that one. Use a different upload of the same song.

In a folder on your Mac. Open Settings and there’s a Reveal in Finder button that takes you straight there. Nothing is uploaded and nothing syncs, so what’s in that folder is all of it.