The MFI DAW is created and published by Musical Futures International. It is available exclusively at musicalfuturesinternational.org as part of the Music Tech Pack and Full Access, alongside Learn the DAW, Remix, Recreate, Movie Music and Game Music. It is not available through any other Musical Futures website or provider.
The Musical Futures International DAW: a music studio your whole school opens with one link
No student accounts. No installs. No per-student pricing. Just a link.
Every music teacher has been through the same week. You find a DAW that looks good, you take it to IT, and then it starts. Accounts have to be provisioned. A privacy assessment has to be written. Consent forms go home. Six weeks later half the class still can't log in and the other half have forgotten their password.
The MFI DAW skips all of it, because there is nothing to log into.
You click Share. You paste the link into Google Classroom. Students click it and they're in the DAW.
No sign-up screen, no email address, no class code, no app store. It opens in whatever browser is already on the machine.
What a first lesson looks like
You send one link
Open the DAW, click Copy Share Link, paste it wherever your class already looks. Google Classroom, Teams, Canvas, Seesaw, an email, a QR code on the board. It's a URL, so it goes anywhere a URL goes.
Students pick a film
Six short films and three game scenes are already loaded, and every one of them is cleared for classroom use. A student picks one and it appears above the timeline. Whatever they write from that point plays against the picture, in time.
If you'd rather use your own footage, upload a clip and it works the same way.
They add a track and draw in some notes
Add a beats track and tap out a kick pattern. Add a melody track and draw four notes over it. That's the first fifteen minutes, and it's the same first fifteen minutes for a Year 7 who has never opened a DAW and a Year 11 who produces at home.
They press Save, and their work becomes a link
Saving updates the student's own link. They open that link next Tuesday, on a different computer, in a different room, and their piece is exactly as they left it. Nothing to name, nothing to find in a folder, nothing lost when the laptop trolley gets reshuffled.
To hand work in, they send you the link. Marking is opening it and pressing play.
A piano melody, an electronic kit and a rain bed, running against a film in the panel beside them.
The Year 11s don't outgrow it
The thing that usually goes wrong with school music software is that it's built down to a level. It works for a term. Then a capable student outgrows it and you're teaching two tools at once.
This one starts simple and keeps going. A Year 7 draws four notes. A Year 11 records a live take, draws automation over it and exports the stems.
- Six track types. Melody, beats, sound effects, ambience beds, live audio and chords. Eight instruments and four drum kits, from a sampled piano to an 808.
- Live recording onto the timeline. Arm a track, press record, and the microphone records in time with the arrangement while the waveform draws itself as it arrives. Voice, guitar, a bucket, a whole band in one take.
- Chord tracks written as scale degrees. Change the key and the whole progression transposes. The melody grid above tints the notes that fit the chord underneath, so a student can see which notes work instead of guessing.
- A mixer with reverb, delay and filter on every track. Pan, mute, solo, per-drum levels, a master fader with a meter and a limiter.
- Automation you can draw. Volume, reverb send, delay and filter cutoff, each with its own curve, all playing at once.
- MIDI in and out. A keyboard plays straight into a clip with velocity. A Roland AIRA Compact locks to the DAW's clock, so the drum machine in the corner finally runs in time with everything else.
- Real exports. A WAV, every track as a separate stem in a ZIP, a MIDI file, or the finished video with picture and music married together.
Download the MIDI and your tracks open in any DAW. A student who changes schools takes their work with them.
The question your IT team is going to ask
They'll ask what data is collected about students. The answer is none. Students are never asked for a name, an email address, a date of birth or a password, so there is nothing to hold.
A saved piece of music sits against a random token in the link. It carries notes and audio. Nothing in it identifies who made it.
For most schools that ends the approval conversation before it starts. There's no vendor to add to a register, no assessment to write, no consent form to send home, and nothing to install on a single machine.
One subscription, however many students you teach
There are no student seats. The price doesn't move with the size of the school, and a subscription covers five teachers rather than one person's login.
A school of 500 students on Full Access is paying under a dollar per student for the year, and the DAW is one part of what that covers.
Three DAWs, one engine
If you already teach with the MFI Movie DAW or the MFI Game DAW, they've had the same upgrade. Everything above is in all three. The Movie DAW sits inside the Movie Music unit, with its lesson sequence around it. The Game DAW does the same in Game Music. The MFI DAW is the open one, for everything else you want to write.
Work saved in any of them keeps working. Old links still open.
The MFI DAW is in the Music Tech Pack and Full Access
Music Tech is 20 units of music technology. Full Access is the whole library, band and ensemble resources included. Both cover five teachers, and neither charges per student.
See the plans