See everything it does
before you download.

1 · Getting started

Installed and playing in two minutes

One signed installer per platform — Windows (VST3 + Standalone) and macOS 11+ (AU + VST3 + Standalone, one universal build for Apple Silicon & Intel). No account, no activation — the player is free forever.

1. Run the installer and choose your formats. Both are digitally signed — Authenticode on Windows, notarized by Apple on macOS — so they install cleanly, no warnings to bypass.
2. On first launch it fills your library with factory content — the Brit 800 hero pack (our launch gift), its 18-capture GAIN sweep with a real working gain knob, the GD-808 Green Drive pedal, presets and a factory cabinet — so it makes real sound immediately, and it opens on a preset rather than on silence.
3. In a DAW, drop NAM 9000 on a guitar track — VST3, or AU in Logic and GarageBand. Standalone? Pick your audio interface in Options and play.
4. Set Input so the meter sits healthy — or press AUTO under Output and play your loudest: it sets the output level for you, and the knob turns red if anything ever clips.
5. Pick a preset and go. New to amp sims? Hover any knob — a small card explains it in plain language (the ?-button in the bottom bar turns the explainers off).

The interface renders through the system webview — Microsoft Edge WebView2 on Windows (ships with Windows 11 and current Windows 10; the installer links the free download if it's ever missing) and WKWebView on macOS, which is built into the OS. Nothing extra to install on a Mac.

2 · The interface

One window, a row of pages

A top toolbar of global controls, a page for each part of the rig, and a bottom bar of utilities. The whole UI is vector art, so it stays razor-sharp at any size.

Always visible

• Input / Gate / Output and a Full / Lite quality switch in the top toolbar. The gate learns your rig's noise floor (AUTO), and the 4CM button adds a second gate stage after the amp, keyed from your clean guitar — the 4-cable trick high-gain players use, without the cables. Output has its own AUTO: play your loudest and it sets the level, with a red clip warning on the knob if you ever go over
• Page icons switch between Amp, Pedalboard, EQ, Multiband, Cabinet, Time FX and the Capture studio
• The preset chip top-left always names the rig you're on, with a dot when you've changed something. Click it for a menu: UPDATE (save over it), REVERT TO SAVED, SAVE AS NEW…, and your recent presets. Loading a profile no longer wipes the name — the dot just tells you the rig has drifted from it
• Bottom bar: browser toggle, tuner, A/B compare, an L/R balance meter with one-press MATCH, a knob-explainer toggle, and a UI-size control — Auto, or a continuous 60–200% slider so it fits any screen
• Ctrl-Z / Cmd-Z undoes anything you just did — a knob sweep counts as one move, and it covers amp, cab and preset loads too
• A gold UPDATE badge appears in the toolbar when a new version ships (one anonymous check a day, switchable off) and opens the release notes right in the app

The rig plate — the whole signal chain at a glance

Under the amp sits a brass plate listing what is actually in your chain right now: PEDALS, AMP, CAB and RACK, each naming what is loaded and engaged. It is not decoration — every cell is live:

• Each section has a ⏻ switch. PEDALS and RACK are masters: switch them off and every engaged unit goes with them, switch back on and the exact same set returns — the fastest way to hear your rig with and without the extras
• The AMP cell's switch is the same power switch as the one on the head, so the two can never disagree
• Load anything and the matching cell pulses gold, so you always see where a click landed

Input calibration — optional, for profiles that carry a reference

Some captures record the analog level they were made at. If yours do, and you want them driven exactly as hot as the capture rig was, open the UI-size popover and tick Calibrate to under INPUT CAL, then enter what your interface clips at in dBu (0 dBFS = that level — most Hi-Z guitar inputs are +12 to +13, and 12.2 is the common convention other loaders use). Profiles without that metadata are left completely alone, and with the box unticked levels pass through as-is — so this is a nicety for matching reference-carrying profiles, never something you must set up before playing.

Lite graphics — for older machines

The interface's moving glow, tube flicker and worn-metal textures cost GPU/CPU that an older laptop may want back. Click the UI-size label in the bottom bar and enable Lite graphics (static) under GRAPHICS: those elements become static, the meters stop animating, and the interface CPU roughly halves — the amp page benefits most. The audio path is untouched — it is purely paint work — and the setting is remembered per machine.

3 · Three views

Console, stage, studio — one rig, three ways to stand in front of it

The tabs top-centre switch how the same rig is shown. Nothing loads or changes when you switch — the two extra views are built when you enter them and torn down when you leave, so they cost nothing while closed. Esc always brings you back to CONSOLE.

CONSOLE

The page-per-block view everything below describes: stomps, amp, EQ, multiband, cab, time FX and the capture studio, with the rig plate under the amp. This is where you build a tone.

STAGE — the live view, at standing distance

Fullscreen, big, built from your actual gear: the pedals on your board on the left, the amp (or both amps in a dual rig) in the middle with a gold card naming AMP / CHANNEL / CAB, the rack effects as three-knob pedal faces on the right, and two rails — IN with the gate and its AUTO, OUT with the level, a stereo meter and a huge tuner and tap-tempo readout. Everything is live: knobs turn, footswitches click, channel buttons switch the head.

• Scenes — snapshots of the whole rig in the strip along the bottom: every knob and switch plus the channel of each amp; switching is one seamless move, no loading. Click + ADD SCENE, or press 1–5 and the arrow keys. The free app holds two scenes per preset, both MIDI-learnable like any control; Pro holds five. A scene keeps whatever you last heard of it, so you never have to remember to save — right-click a scene cell to RENAME, UPDATE, DELETE or put it on a footswitch with MIDI LEARN
• Single or dual per scene — in a dual rig, right-click amp B → DISABLE IN THIS SCENE — PLAY SINGLE, and that scene plays amp A alone exactly as single mode would while the next scene brings B back, both heads resident the whole time. The scene volume trim is what keeps the two at the same loudness
• SCENE VOLUME PRO — the button in the TAP cell opens big L/R output meters with peak-hold and a gold slider on a per-scene level trim (±18 dB). Switch scenes, watch where each peaks, trim them to match — then OUTPUT stays the one global master. It is a real parameter, saved in the preset
• Zoom into any unit — hover a pedal, amp or rack unit, click the ⤢ pill (or press Z) and its full editor opens as a live overlay: the EQ and the multiband comp bring their whole pages in, everything else its faceplate. Z or Esc closes it
• Right-click is the menu — pedals: MIDI LEARN / REPLACE WITH… / REMOVE; the gold wire: ADD PEDAL (in front of the amp) or ADD EFFECT (after it), captured drives included; the amp: BROWSE AMP MODELS (your library grouped like the browser, favourites and recents first), LOAD / REPLACE AMP B, CLEAR AMP B; any unit: HIDE FROM STAGE VIEW, which is visual only — it keeps processing and comes back from a pill at the bottom-left
• Keys — 1–5 scenes, ←/→ previous/next scene, T tap tempo, M tuner, Z zoom, Esc back

The two OLED screens on the EQ and MB COMP faces show the live spectrum and the four gain-reduction bars; both park when their unit is bypassed. Scenes travel inside the preset file, so a preset without scenes is byte-identical to before.

STUDIO — the mixing engineer's view

The whole chain as a grid of blocks in true processing order — IN → pedals → GATE → AMP → CAB → EQ → MB COMP → rack → DELAY → REVERB → OUT, with a dual rig split into A ⫽ B lanes that merge at a MIXER block — and the selected block's full editor in the window below. Frames around it carry what an engineer glances at: a left rail with scene chips, rig summary, DSP load and edition; a right rail with IN / OUT-L/R / GR meters and the output knob; a bottom strip with the routing map of the real rig (dual amps, dual cabs, the 4CM post-gate), tempo and TAP, the last MIDI CC seen, and the tuner.

• Click a block, edit it — real editors, not summaries: knob panes with printed live values for the amp (tone stack included, in faceplate order), gate, mixer and I/O; the app's own CAB, EQ and MB COMP pages move in and back out; pedal and rack faces as live clones. The amp pane also draws the sweep strip: every measured capture point of a gain sweep as a dot, with a gold marker riding the GAIN knob
• The chain is the preset's — drag pedals to reorder, right-click a block → REMOVE FROM CHAIN, and the + after the amp offers EQ, CABINET and the rack effects back (the + in front of the amp is the pedalboard's). The grid, the stage board and the console pages all read the same list, so they can never disagree
• EFFECTS RACK — click the MOD / DELAY / REVERB window and four 19" units unfold, one per rack plate, with real hardware knobs on the real parameters. MB COMP gets a one-band-at-a-time editor with six big knobs and the four GR meters, plus presets
• Dual cab pane — two cabs side by side with their own ‹ › steppers; the IR list marks both loaded cabs, gold for A and blue for B, and the arrow keys cycle the selected one
• Make it yours — every frame hides (✕) and comes back from the ⚙ VIEW popover, which also has RESET TO DEFAULT; the grid/detail splitter and rail widths drag. The library browser docks as a column. The layout is remembered per machine and never stored in a preset
• MIDI here too — right-click any effect or section for MIDI LEARN, including one switch for the whole pedalboard or the whole rack (they remember which units were on and bring back exactly that set)

Settings and maximize are the same two icons top-right in all three views. On a 4:3 or small screen STUDIO stacks its frames; the console pages are unaffected by anything you do in the other two views.

4 · The amp

Any neural capture, fully gain-staged

The heart of the rig. Load any standard .nam profile — from the built-in library, TONE3000, a preset pack, or your own captures — and dial it in on a real amp panel.

• Gain, Bass, Mid, Treble, Presence, Master, High Cut and Level — a familiar amp face, not a list of sliders
• The GAIN knob is real on any gain-swept profile: instead of filtering one capture, it crossfades between a dozen or more separate captures of the amp taken across its actual gain range, so turning it up changes how the amp breaks up, not just how loud it is. Every hero pack ships one
• Full / Lite quality: full fidelity for mixing, a lighter model for stacking many instances live — switched without reloading
• Full-rig captures (amp + cab baked in) automatically bypass the cabinet section; amp-only captures keep it active

5 · Multichannel amps

The whole head, channel switch and all

A normal capture freezes an amp at one setting. A multichannel amp is the entire amplifier: every channel captured as its own gain sweep, presented as the real head with its own faceplate and switches.

• Click a channel and the amp switches, exactly like reaching for the front panel. Clean, Crunch and Lead each remember their own gain and their own tone stack, so going back to a channel gives you the sound you left there
• Amps with a voicing switch per channel (vintage/modern) get those too — the switch belongs to the channel, so flipping it never disturbs the other side
• Amps that really have one shared knob row behave that way: switching inputs leaves every knob exactly where you set it, because that is what the hardware does
• The right head appears by itself when you load any of its channels — including from a preset, which stores the head it was built on
• Look for the steel 3 CH / 2 CH badge in the browser, and the MULTI-CH filter pill to see only these amps. Presets built on one carry the badge too
• Free to try in the free app: every multichannel amp auditions free — all channels, no account — then your own amp returns. 2½ minutes at a time, 5 minutes with Pro, and you can start another whenever you like. The head downloads itself once, in one go, the first time you play it
• The free app also ships factory presets built on these amps, so you can hear one in a finished, mixed rig rather than judging it from a bare head

Multichannel amps are optional add-ons (one is included with NAM 9000 Pro). Unlocking is one step — paste the key, see Unlocking what you bought. See the packs page.

6 · The pedalboard

A reorderable stomp chain — with captured drives

Drag pedals into the order you want: a compressor, the GD-808 Green Drive, a slot for any captured pedal, plus boost, wah, pitch, phaser, flanger, tremolo and chorus.

GD-808 Green Drive — the screamer, captured nine times

The built-in overdrive is not a filter pretending to be a pedal. Its DRIVE knob rides nine real captures of the pedal taken across its drive range, so every position is the actual circuit clipping the way it really does at that setting. TONE and LEVEL work as they do on the hardware (TONE at noon is the capture untouched). It ships with the free app — turn the knob and you can hear exactly what a multi-captured pedal buys you before paying for one.

Fifteen more drives, free to audition

The ADD PEDAL menu lists fifteen more drives, grouped the way players think — Screamer, Modern boost, Transparent, Tube, Distortion, Fuzz and Bass. Every one is a multi-point capture with the same working DRIVE knob. Three of them are our own circuits rather than captures of famous boxes: NAM BOOST, NAM LEAD and CIRCUIT SLAMMER. You can play any of them for 30 seconds at a time before you buy, marked PREVIEW, so you hear it in your own mix first; buying just stops the clock.

The NAM CAPTURE slot

• Loads any captured drive or fuzz — yours or ours — in front of the amp capture: two neural engines in series
• Load a gain-swept pedal into it and a gold DRIVE knob arms, sweeping that pedal continuously just like the GD-808
• Clicking a pedal capture in the browser routes it here automatically — you don't have to pick the slot

All the non-captured effects are in-house DSP, and engage/bypass is crossfaded rather than switched, so you can build tones while you play. The rig plate's PEDALS ⏻ master drops the whole board and brings back the same set.

7 · Studio EQ

A graphic and a parametric — at the same time

Two independent EQ panels with live analyzers: a 10-band graphic rack unit and an 8-band parametric, both usable at once for surgical and broad shaping.

• Parametric: draggable bands over a real-time spectrum, with Nyquist-safe filters at any session rate
• Graphic: fixed-band rack unit for fast, familiar moves

8 · Multiband compressor PRO

The metal-mixing weapon

Four crossover bands, each with its own compressor and gain-reduction meter — tighten low-end chug without dulling the top, all inside the plugin.

• Linkwitz-Riley crossovers, per-band threshold / ratio / attack / release
• Starter presets — TIGHT METAL and GENTLE GLUE — get a tight modern tone in seconds, and they work in the free edition too
• The free edition can apply the starters and switch it on/off; per-band editing is a Pro feature

9 · Cabinet

Real impulse-response convolution

Load any .wav IR, or the factory blended-speaker cabinet. IRs are loudness-normalized on the guitar band so swapping a cab changes tone, not level.

• Per-rate IR masters (44.1 / 48 / 96 kHz) picked automatically to match the engine
• Phase invert, high/low cut, and a Full-Range / Cab-Bypassed toggle for baked-in-cab captures

Cycling cabs — the fastest way to find the one

Comparing IRs by name is hopeless; comparing them by ear takes seconds. The ‹ › arrows beside the cab step through your whole IR library one at a time, and the left/right arrow keys do the same while the cab page is open — so you can keep both hands off the mouse, play a riff, and step until it sits. Each step names the IR and its position ("IR 14/57") in a toast.

The browser follows along and colour-codes what is loaded: a gold bar and gold name marks the IR in slot A, and a blue bar and blue name marks the one in slot B when you're running the dual-mic blend — so a long list always shows you where you are, and which of the two mics you're about to replace. (Amp rows use the same gold marker for the profile that's playing.)

In dual-cab mode the arrows step whichever cab you last touched, and clicking a cab's arrows also selects it — so the keyboard always follows the mic you're working on.

10 · Time FX

Delay and reverb to finish the chain

Post-cab time effects on one dual pedal: a multi-mode delay with tempo sync, and a four-engine reverb — the last stage before your rig is a mix-ready channel.

• Delay: digital, analog, tape and ping-pong modes, host-tempo synced
• OFFSET spreads the repeats in stereo without ping-pong: the right side lags the left by up to 25 ms, so the echoes sit wide around your dry tone instead of bouncing side to side. At zero the delay is mono, exactly as before
• Reverb with four engines — room, hall, spring and plate — true stereo tails, pre-delay and lo cut on the tail, one TONE knob from warm to airy
• Trails: switch either off and the tail rings out naturally
• Both ON switches glow with what you're actually hearing — the delay's ring follows its repeats, the reverb's follows its tail — so you can see the effect breathing even when it sits low in the mix

11 · Capture & training studio

Clone your own gear

Built-in profiler: play a test signal through your amp, pedal or whole rig and train a neural model of it — on your own NVIDIA GPU on Windows, or free in the cloud on Mac (and on any machine without an NVIDIA card). No separate software.

1. Test checks your connection, latency, noise floor and repeatability so you know the capture will be clean before you commit.
2. Record plays a ~3-minute sweep through your rig and captures the return, with live progress.
3. Train builds the model on your GPU; the match quality (ESR) is reported so you know it's good.
4. Compare A/Bs the clone against the real thing.

You choose how hard it trains: 50 up to 1000 epochs (100 is a few minutes, 1000 can take hours on a modest GPU), or set an ESR target — 0.02 down to 0.002 — and training stops the moment the tone match is that close, whichever comes first. An easy amp finishes early instead of grinding through every epoch; a difficult one uses the ceiling you allowed.

Captures of your own gear export to NAM-compatible hardware (Dimehead, HoTone, Darkglass and others) as a standard .nam — free, no strings. Your captures now also record the input level they were made at (only when INPUT CAL is switched on — a guessed figure is worse than none), so a hardware player can drive them exactly as your rig was driven.

Taking a whole preset to hardware PRO

A bare profile is an ingredient, not a sound: it does not know which channel, which gain position, which drives or which cab you dialled. So the thing worth exporting is the preset. Right-click any preset in the library → Export for hardware… and the app first measures your playing level and tells you what to set on your unit, then renders the whole rig — amp, drives, tone stack, EQ and cab — and trains it into one .nam. A gain-swept amp is baked at the knob position; a multichannel head exports the channel that is lit (save a preset per channel for the rest). Your own plain captures still export directly on every edition; purchased pack content cannot be exported on its own, only dialled into a preset and exported that way.

No NVIDIA GPU? Train in the cloud

Local training needs an NVIDIA GPU — but you don't need one to capture. Record the sweep as usual, then hit Export for TONE3000: the app saves your recording alongside the standard input file and opens tone3000.com/capture, where you upload both and train in the browser for free. Download the finished .nam and load it straight back into NAM 9000. Same capture, no graphics card required — it's the recommended path on machines without an NVIDIA GPU, and the standard path on macOS.

12 · Library & TONE3000

Thousands of tones, organized your way

A browser for your profiles, cabs and presets — searchable, sortable, and yours to organize into groups — plus the whole TONE3000 library built right in.

Groups — make your own shelves

A library of thousands is only useful if you can carve it up. Any profile, IR or preset can live in a group of your making, and the browser renders them as collapsible folders with counts:

• Create a group as you file something into it — right-click any item, pick MOVE TO → + new folder…, name it, done. There is no separate "make a folder" step, so you never end up with empty shelves
• Move a lot at once: Ctrl-click to pick items, Shift-click for a range, then right-click → MOVE TO — the menu shows how many you're moving and lists every group you already have, plus (no folder) to send them back to the root
• Or just drag — grab a row and drop it on a group header
• Right-click a group to rename it, or delete it — deleting a group only dissolves the shelf, the files move back to the root untouched
• Drag files in from your desktop: drop .nam, .wav IRs or preset files straight onto the browser and they're imported and filed. Delete (or Backspace) removes what you've selected, with a confirm — profiles and IRs are kept in a _removed folder, so only preset deletion is final

Groups are real folders inside your library, so anything you organize in the app is organized on disk too. Factory content stays read-only.

Finding things fast

• Sort by A–Z, by amp (grouping every scene of one amp together regardless of where it lives), by brand, by tone — clean/crunch/high-gain — or by gain set, which expands a sweep into its individual capture points
• Filter pills: favourites (★), USED / UNUSED (is any preset referencing this profile?), GAIN for sweeps, MULTI-CH for multichannel heads, plus category pills like AMP, AMP+CAB and PEDAL
• Badges tell you what a row is at a glance: FULL (amp + cab), AMP (amp only), PEDAL, a gold knob + GAIN for a sweep, steel 3 CH for a multichannel head, and 5 MIN on a free preview
• Hover a preset and a card shows exactly what is inside it — amp, cab, pedals, rack — before you load it. The gold marker shows what is playing right now
• A sweep collapses into one row, not fifteen: you load the amp, not a pile of capture files

TONE3000 — sign in once

• Connect your free TONE3000 account from the TONE3000 tab: a browser tab opens for sign-in, you approve, and this computer stays connected. No API keys to paste any more
• Browse and download amps, pedals and full rigs without leaving the plugin — each routes itself to the right slot
• IRs too: pull cabinet and room impulse responses straight into the CAB slot, and right-click any tone to see more by the same creator

13 · Dual rig PRO

Two full amps, two cabs, one plugin

Run two independent amp captures in parallel, each with its own mix panel, and blend two cabs — a two-mic blend on one amp, or a full cab per amp.

The plugin is mono-in by design; the stereo image is created intentionally inside the box. Engaging dual mode pans the two amps hard left and right by default — the right way to run a dual rig (a wide, dimensional tone, each amp on its own side). Summing two amps to the centre instead phase-cancels the low end, so the plugin warns you if both land near centre or if the two captures have different native sample rates.

Why a dual rig is panned, never summed — the measurements

Two nonlinear amp captures must never be summed onto one channel. We measured it on the real audio engine (the internal DspProbe --dual harness, driving the actual mixer with noise and reading back the spectrum) and found two independent things go wrong when two amps share a channel:

• Low-end phase cancellation. Two different captures partially cancel where their phase disagrees — measured at −16 dB at 80 Hz and −4 dB at 120 Hz. That hollowed-out low end is the classic "thin dual" tone. It happens at any pan while both amps share a channel, and a mono sum can never escape it.
• Midrange comb filtering. Every capture carries its own native sample rate; two branches at different rates end up a few samples apart in time. Summed, that comb-filters the 1–6 kHz midrange by 30–50 dB — a phasey, hollow mid on top of the thin bass.

Panned hard left and right, neither mechanism can fire: each amp lands on its own channel, so there is nothing to cancel or comb against. Measured that way each side is identical to that amp running solo (0.0 dB difference across the spectrum) — the second amp adds stereo width and depth, not a tonal fight. That is why the plugin spreads the amps hard L/R the instant you go dual, nudges you with a warning if they drift back toward centre, and — as below — renders a dual amp rig to two separate files rather than one blend.

Render Rig — what a dual rig exports

Render Rig bakes the live rig into a standard .nam. Because a .nam is mono in and out, what it writes depends on the rig:

• Single amp → one profile, as before.
• Dual amps → two profiles, "…L" and "…R" (one per head). Each is rendered in isolation — no summing, and no pan baked in — so the two files stay clean. Load them back into a dual rig, or into two slots of NAM-compatible hardware, and the exact stereo tone survives: no width lost, nothing cancelled.
• One amp through dual cabs → one profile. Cab convolution is linear, so a two-mic IR blend bakes cleanly into a single file — exactly how commercial blended IRs ship. (A dual amp and dual cab still splits L/R, each head taking its own cab.)

IR alignment — automatic, plus a fine trim

Blending two IRs has its own classic failure mode: every IR carries its own leading dead time (mic distance, processing padding), and two IRs whose impulses don't land at the same instant comb-filter when summed — the same hollow sound, from the cab side. Hardware modelers ship an "align" control in their cab blocks for exactly this reason.

NAM 9000 handles it in two layers:

• Automatic onset alignment (everyone). Every IR is scanned at load and shifted so its impulse starts at the exact same position. Two IRs that would have combed — measured on our engine, a 37-sample offset notches the blend by −21 dB — sum to a 0.0 dB-ripple flat blend after alignment. You never touch anything.
• ALIGN micro-delay (Pro). A ±2 ms knob on the IR B rail nudges one mic against the other (positive delays B, negative delays A) — the by-ear fine trim for creative mic-distance effects or IRs whose tonal centers sit later than their onsets. Sample-accurate, verified against the theoretical comb positions.

If a blend still thins out, the per-mic phase button (Ø) flips polarity — alignment fixes timing, Ø fixes polarity; together they cover both ways two mics can fight. All of it applies before Render Rig bakes a blend, so exported profiles are phase-true too.

14 · MIDI control

A controller, a footswitch, and no mouse

Built for the standalone app: right-click anything, pick MIDI LEARN, move the control on your controller. Free in both editions.

• Any control — right-click a knob, switch, fader or pedal → MIDI LEARN → move the control you want it on. The banner names what you're learning; ESC cancels.
• Footswitch actions — amp channel + / − and channels 1–8 as direct slots (amp B has its own set in a dual rig), scenes 1–5 and scene + / −, the STAGE view toggle, the PEDALS and RACK master switches, preset + / −, tuner, A/B and tap tempo. Learn them from the ACTIONS list in the MIDI panel, or by right-clicking the control that already does the job — a multichannel head's own channel buttons, for instance. They fire on the press, so a switch that sends 127 then 0 acts once, not twice.
• One CC per preset — right-click a preset in the library and learn it. The preset's amp comes in with it.
• Program Change — #1 is the first preset by name, #2 the second, walking the same order as PRESET +/−. It ships off: a CC you mapped only touches what you put on it, while a program change acts on whatever arrives.
• The panel — under the settings gear: on/off, the MIDI channel to listen on (OMNI by default), a live monitor of incoming messages, every mapping with an ✕ to forget it, and CLEAR ALL.

Your mapping belongs to the machine, not to the tone — it lives in midi_map.json beside your library, and presets never carry it. A DAW project keeps its own copy, so reopening a session restores the mapping it was built with.

In the standalone, tick your controller under Options ▸ Audio/MIDI Settings first — the panel tells you when it hasn't seen any MIDI yet.

In a DAW, use your host first

This is honest advice rather than a limitation: your host can bind a CC to any plugin parameter and record it as automation, which plugin-side MIDI cannot. What the plugin adds in a host is the half automation can't reach — switching amp channels and loading presets from a footswitch. In Logic the AU receives no MIDI at all: the only way to give an audio-effect AU MIDI input is to change its type, which would have made every saved Logic project open with the plugin missing. That trade wasn't worth making. Use Smart Controls or automation in Logic, and the standalone when you want feet on it.

15 · Presets & packs

Save your own, or start from ours

A preset stores the whole rig — every pedal, the amp, both EQs, the cab and the time FX — as one recallable channel strip. Share them as bundles, or unlock curated packs.

Saving and recalling

• The preset chip is the whole workflow: it names what you're on, shows a dot once you've changed anything, and its menu holds UPDATE, REVERT TO SAVED, SAVE AS NEW… and your recent presets
• Loading a profile or cab keeps the preset name and just marks it dirty, so UPDATE and REVERT always have something to aim at — and the app never opens on "no preset"
• A preset also remembers the multichannel head it was built on, so the right amp face and channel come back with it
• Export any preset as a shareable bundle from its right-click menu

Preset packs

Optional paid packs add curated, mix-ready tones. Each hero pack ships every amp twice — the finished full rig (cab baked in) and an amp-only "DI" profile to pair with your own cab or IR — plus that amp's continuous GAIN sweep, 16 to 31 real captures across its gain range on one knob. Multichannel amps are a pack of their own: a whole head with working channel switching, and one is included with Pro. Unlocking is fully offline: paste your license key into the in-app Unlock dialog. No account, no activation server.

Unlocking what you bought

Your license key arrives by email within a minute of ordering, and it is also attached as a .namlicense file. Everything below happens in the plugin's browser panel — there is no website login and no activation server. Keys work offline, never expire, and stay valid on every machine you own.

Look for the gold UNLOCK PACK button under the preset name, top-left. That is the one place keys go in — for packs, pedals, multichannel amps and Pro alike.

Drive pedals and multichannel amps are one step: paste the key, play. Pedals already ship inside NAM 9000, so there is nothing at all to fetch — before you buy, one plays for 30 seconds at a time marked PREVIEW, and your key simply stops the clock. Multichannel amps are far too large for the installer, so the app fetches the head once by itself the first time you play it — as a single download for the whole amp, all channels — and keeps it. Unlocking one turns the audition into ownership: the browser row gains a YOURS badge, the five-minute clock never appears again, and the amp is there after a restart, offline.

NAM 9000 Pro is the same routine: paste the key and the Pro features light up in the free app. Pro also includes one multichannel amp of your choice — your order email carries a personal one-time code, so you pick the amp you want and pay nothing for it.

Amp and preset packs are the one case with two steps, because a pack is a file. Download the .nampack from the link in your email, click INSTALL .NAMPACK in the browser panel and choose it, then click UNLOCK PACK and paste your key. (Buying a multichannel amp gets you its pack as an optional bulk download too — handy for a studio machine that is kept offline — but you never need it.)

On builds before 1.8.1 the button is instead a small UNLOCK pill in the filter row under the browser's search box — easy to miss, which is why it moved.

Keys are personalized with your email address, which is shown to anyone who activates them. Please don't share them.