The cost is £60, available now at safariaudio.com.
Great sound rarely comes from a single tool. It comes from selecting several effects and linking them together. This is the core skill of mixing. How people build these chains has always been a bit of a mystery. Producers spend years perfecting their vocal setups, and mastering engineers keep their mix bus settings private. Beginners often find the whole process overwhelming. Meaw Chain from Safari Audio aims to fix this. It uses artificial intelligence to analyse audio files and suggest a sequence of plugins based on text instructions.
Is making a core part of music production more accessible a good thing? Or is it just a game that offers novelty but little real use?
This is the second AI tool from Safari Audio. The first, Meaw Assist, acts as a chatbot inside your digital audio workstation. It listens to your track and offers advice on production or mixing. Meaw Chain builds on that work but adds a wrapper that hosts VST3, AU, and AAX formats.
When I first opened the software, I saw a salmon pink interface. A short quiz asked about my experience level, the type of projects I work on, and what I wanted the tool to focus on. Ideas and inspiration, technical fixes, or a mix of both. Next, it scanned my installed plugins. Then I started.
I described the sound I wanted in plain English. I asked for dark but punchy drums. Within a second or two, Meaw Chain presented a custom chain of audio effects matching my request. Each generated chain came with a text explanation detailing what changes were made to the audio and why.
The initial results were heavy handed. I was still impressed by how easy it was to tweak the chain with follow-up requests. For better results, Meaw Chain can analyse a track’s audio. This allows future prompts to be contextualised against that analysis.
Initial setup
Safari Audio is primarily a plugin maker. It offers a respectable range of audio processing and effects. These serve as a strong starting point to see what Meaw Chain can do. The developers wisely chose not to limit the tool to its own plugins. At the time of writing, it supports 130 third-party plugins from makers such as Arturia, FabFilter, iZotope, SSL, Soundtoys, and Universal Audio.
However, left to its own devices, Meaw Chain tends to prioritise plugins from the Safari Audio lineup in the chains it generates. You can direct Meaw Chain to use or exclude individual plugins, or to draw only from certain developers. This is a useful feature.
The real surprise is Meaw Chain’s ability to manipulate parameters within plugins from any developer. The chains it generates do not use a plugin’s supplied presets. Instead, parameters are dynamically changed to fit a prompt. Users can zero in on individual controls and ask for changes. You can expand a plugin’s window and move a dial with the cursor, but that is not the point.
Limitations
There are limits to this approach. A few times I asked for a specific parameter change only to be told that the parameter could not be accessed. At other times, Meaw Chain seemed to get overlapping parameters confused. A request to make my dark and punchy drum chain a bit brighter resulted in boosted high frequencies and a low pass filter.
Meaw Chain paints with a broad brush. The more specific and detailed you want to be, the less sense this workflow makes. Repeated prompting is hardly more efficient than doing things by hand.
If you just want to quickly try out ideas, it can be powerful. Each new plugin chain you generate is stored in your chat history. You can build up a set of variations and A/B them to compare results. You can also access the full history of conversations you’ve had with Meaw Chain across any project or DAW. This turns it into an ever-evolving bank of presets that can be reused or tweaked to fit each new mix.
However, as I considered what Meaw Chain is truly useful for, and who it is useful for, the questions became thorny.
To make the most of Meaw Chain, you need a decent store of third-party plugins. This is a paradox. The people who will benefit the most from Meaw Chain are likely to be those still learning the finer points of music production. These users are also less likely to have invested in a wide selection of tools. If you are an experienced bedroom producer or a studio professional with lots of audio plugins at your disposal, do you really need the kind of simplified mix assistance Meaw Chain offers?
This is a fascinating and genuinely cool implementation of AI in a music production context. The results work better as starting points. It does not offer the specificity needed to get a mix up to a professional standard. As the number of third-party plugins Meaw Chain supports continues to grow and its audio analysis increases in quality, we might see mixing via prompts become the new normal.
What it means
For creators, Meaw Chain removes the friction of finding the right combination of effects. It is not a replacement for manual mixing, but a way to test ideas quickly. The tool works best when paired with a large library of existing plugins, which creates a barrier for beginners who cannot yet afford such gear.
