What it is for
Four evenings that happen to every musician, and what happens to them with a band in the room.
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You wrote a few chords and you are looking for the melody
Type them in, set a tempo, press play, and sing over a band instead of over your own strumming. The loop does not get tired, it does not rush the turnaround, and it will play the same four bars for an hour while you find the line.
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The song is in your head and rehearsal is on Thursday
Write the chart, export the MIDI, print the sheet, send both. Everybody arrives having heard the same thing, and the first hour of the rehearsal goes to playing it rather than to teaching it.
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You want the song written down before you forget it
Not the recording, the shape: which sections there are, what order they go in, how many bars each takes and what the chords are. Songs are lost that way more often than they are lost on tape.
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It is Friday and everybody has brought a guitar
Two guitars and no rhythm section is a long evening. Set a blues in A, pick a tempo everybody can play at, and there is a kit and a bass in the room for as long as you want one.
Where it sits
Between the idea and the studio. A musician has an idea, and somewhere far down the line there is a DAW, a producer, an engineer and a record. jamwi is the part in between: the place the idea becomes something you can hear, play along to and hand to somebody, before any of that starts.
What it is not
It is not a DAW, and it is not trying to become one. There is no mixing desk, no plugin, no automation lane, no audio track and no bounce that is ready to release. What comes out is a performance of your chart and a MIDI file of it, which is where the DAW starts rather than where it ends.
And there is nothing to learn first. No manual, no course, no hour spent finding out where a program keeps things. You type chords, because that is what you would write on paper anyway, and the band plays them.