Desktop Local surface

What it is

The Local tab is the part of the desktop app that is not the web app in a window. It knows about this machine: the DAW projects on its disk, the folders it watches, what has synced to it, and the audio it can play without a network.

Using it

The tabs across the top are System (this machine), App (the web app), Organisations, Admin and Links (socials and your own pages). The speaker in the title bar shows what is playing on hover, with the transport and the volume under it, wherever you are in the app. Your account, the theme, the language, the app's zoom and sign-out are in the team switcher on the left.

Two surfaces side by side: the split button next to the tabs names what goes in the second pane, rather than guessing. Any surface can pair with any other, two social pages included, which is the pairing that was not reachable when it was a toggle.

A bar at the bottom shows what is playing on every tab, with the queue behind its queue button. It is the web app's bar, the same components, not a copy of them: @aden/ui/components/player-bar holds the layout and the transport and @aden/ui/components/player-queue-panel holds the queue, and each app passes in what differs. Clicking the title or the chevron goes back to the player. It is not a second player, only a view of the one that owns the audio.

Home opens on your projects, searchable from the box beside the section. Each tile is a real project file with the icon Finder gives it, so an .flp and an .als are told apart at a glance. Click one to open it in its DAW.

• New project is the first tile. It launches an app on an empty session: every DAW opens on a blank project when started with no document, so starting one is launching the app. With one music app installed it goes straight there; with several it opens a searchable list showing each app's own icon, and Choose an app… at the bottom takes anything the scan missed.
• The gear holds everything about how the list is built: Show as (rows or tiles), Where to look (across the machine by default, most recent first, or one folder you pick), and Include .zip for sessions people keep zipped. Search sits beside the heading it filters, not at the far edge.
• A project open in your DAW right now carries a green dot and "Open", on Home and in the sidebar.
• A project's menu (hover a tile) opens it in its DAW, shows it in Finder, links it to a track, or sends it as a transfer.
  • Link to a track is the same "new track, or link an existing one" dialog Aden shows when you open an .flp from Finder, so the question is asked in one place rather than two.
  • Send as a transfer zips the project's folder and gives you a link that expires in 30 days. It shows the folder's file count first, and when that count says the folder holds little more than the project file it names your DAW's collect-all export ("File > Collect All and Save" and so on) and tells you to run that first. A project file points at its audio by absolute path: zip it alone and it opens on the other machine with everything missing.

The sidebar lists your last few projects under the navigation, the way the web app lists tracks in its own. Clicking one opens it in its DAW.

Recent is under the projects, and it is everything: bounces, sessions, zips, whatever moved on this disk lately. A bounce, the session it came from and the zip you sent a collaborator are one afternoon's work, so they are one list. Synced narrows it to the folders Aden syncs (the team folder and every track folder), which is "what changed in the work I share"; the chips filter it by format, several at a time. Clicking a row plays it (or opens it, for a session), and the artwork is the play button: the icon crossfades in on hover where your eye already is. Add to queue and Show in Finder sit at the end of the row, and right-clicking gives the same actions in words plus Copy path. Its gear holds Show as (rows or columns) and which folders it reads: left alone it reads Music, Downloads and Desktop, which for most people is every audio file on the machine and almost none of it theirs. Add a folder and it reads that one instead; add one under Skip to keep a sample library or a cloud mirror out.

The player is below that: cover on the left, then the title, the actions and the waveform in one column beside it. A/B and the loudness readout sit in the top-right rail, and the transport is one symmetrical row — shuffle, previous, back 15s, play, forward 15s, next, repeat. Clicking the waveform plays from there, even on a launch where nothing has loaded yet.

Hovering the loudness readout explains M, S and I; clicking it opens EQ, speed, pitch and mono. That is the web player's own panel, not a copy: the desktop hands its audio element to the shared audio store, so both surfaces run the same graph and the same controls.

It has no History or Browse tabs any more: history was a list nobody opened, and Browse pointed at a folder that Recent now covers. The queue is not here either: it lives in the bottom bar, the way it does on the web.

Files is everything about this team on this machine, and it asks one question first. Sync and Files used to be two tabs answering the same question: Sync owned the folder and the tracks, Files owned the list of files inside it, and neither made sense without the other.

Until the team has a folder on this Mac, that question is the only thing on the page: pick a folder, and Aden keeps this team's projects there and pushes your changes back as you save. Everything below it needs that folder to exist, so nothing below it is shown yet.

Once it is set, one card holds the folder: the path (click it to open in Finder), how much of it is on this Mac, how many tracks are synced, when it last synced, and what is being synced. Sync now sits in the same card, and its dropdown holds everything else about that folder: what gets synced, Live sync, Sync settings, Change folder and Stop syncing this folder. It used to be a folder row, a separate controls row and a status line under that: three places to look for one thing, with an Open button next to a path people already read as a link.

Under it, two tabs, because tracks and files are two lists of the same folder and stacking them meant scrolling a screen of files to reach the board:

• Tracks is the board and the linked folders, with the same Filter and Display controls the web app's entity lists have: multi-select status, DAW and on-this-Mac facets beside a Display popover for the view and the sort. It was one single-value status select buried inside Display. Sync to this Mac on a card makes that track a folder inside the team folder, pulls down whatever the cloud already has for it, and pushes what you save in it from then on; the card then reads Syncing and a toast says how many files landed. Add file copies files into that folder, and is only offered once the track has one. Each card says whether the track is on this device: a green dot with the folder's name, or "Not on this device". The status is not repeated on the card, because the column it sits in is the status. Open a track and Compare is there: pick two versions and hear them against each other, the same panel, picker, meters and audio engine the web app uses. Track folders below it are folders you already have, each linked to one track. Add folder picks one and then asks which track it is, with No track yet, create one in the same dialog. Dropping an .flp or .als on the app asks the same question.
• Files is everything Aden has for this team, whether or not it is on this Mac. A monitor icon means the file is here, a cloud icon means it is not. Search it, filter to On this Mac or In the cloud, and each row can be downloaded, shown in Finder, or removed from the disk (the cloud copy stays). Recently synced, Watched folders and Storage on this device are collapsed under it.

Match local exports to tracks, the one-off import that turns a folder of MP3/WAV exports into final versions, lives in Settings under Import, and in the command palette.

Samples is the sample libraries (see the sample-libraries spec). AI DAW is the local MCP bridge.

Scale the app with Cmd/Ctrl and +, - or 0, or from Zoom in the team switcher. It scales every Aden window and survives a restart.