David Zicarelli has announced that Cycling ‘74 is discontinuing Max/MSP Pluggo-based products, meaning the company will no longer develop Pluggo, Mode, Hipno, or UpMix. More significantly, this means an end to the use of Max/MSP as a way of developing plug-ins; David writes that there will be “no further development on … their supporting technology.” It’s the supporting technology that Max patchers have relied upon to make their own instruments and effects for VST/AU/RTAS Mac and Windows hosts, and its demise to me is the real news here for the Max community.

The article touts the upcoming availability of Max for Live as an alternative. Now, I think Max for Live is a very exciting technology – I’m finally editing some videos and discussion with Jeremy Bernstein, so we’ll have a preview next week. The flipside is:

• Less compatibility. Ableton Live is just one host. Pluggo support RTAS, VST, and AU on Mac and Windows, so you could use your Max patches as plug-ins in tools like Logic or FL Studio, too. (Ultimately, having to figure out how to support all those things was part of Pluggo’s demise, but the desire to do so still holds.)
• No free runtime. Cycling ‘74 has been clear in that Max for Live will be a paid product. So, whereas a developer could create a Pluggo plug-in with Max/MSP and deploy it for free use anywhere, now you have to assume that the person using your plug-in will buy both Live and (separately) Max for Live.

For an example of why the Pluggo technology has been important, see examples like Ms. Pinky’s Wrecked System (though I appreciate the irony of that screenshot being Ableton).

Max for Live is awesome, it just isn’t Pluggo exactly – for better and for worse. The good news is, some of the oddball Pluggo instruments and effects will be available for Max for Live when it comes out, and existing owners will get that at a discount. But you might want to keep an old Mac or PC around running Max 4 and some of the strange plug-ins in the Pluggo collection.

Pluggo Technology Moves to Max for Live

Thanks to Jonathan Bailey and Nick Inhofe for sending this in.

The upshot to me is that Max/MSP is no longer such a viable development environment for effects and instruments, if you want any kind of wider consumption of what you’re making. It can be, at the same time, an utterly brilliant environment for yourself and for other people working with Max and Live. But on the other hand, part of the reason this may not be earth-shaking news is that there are alternatives – see below.

That’s not to argue with the fact that the Max + Ableton Live combination will rock and be a big deal – no argument there.

So, I actually think it may be a good thing for Max to have this focus, especially because, if you do want to support other hosts, there’s no reason to limit yourself to Max.

Open Source and Commercial Flavors

What I think is happening – perhaps naturally so – is a differentiation between the proprietary and open paths. If you choose the commercial Max/MSP – Max for Live – Ableton Live route, you get a really unparalleled level of UI polish and usability, and extraordinary integration between your Max creations and the host (Live).

The open-source altnerative now increasingly offers greater compatibility and flexibility. We’ve seen Max’s open source cousin Pure Data (Pd) run as the back end to a commercial game (Spore), on Linux on PDAs and old iPods, and as the back end to commercial iPhone apps.This is enabled by the fact that Pd is open source and community-supported, just as the ability to interoperate more deeply with Ableton Live was enabled by a commercial development process. (ChucK has also shown up powering successful mobile apps, like Smule’s Ocarina.)

That’s not to say one route is better than the other. On the contrary, it’s important to look at these two choices side by side because they’re different, and differently suited to particular situations.

And focus can be a good thing. In the case of Cycling ‘74, the decision was that plug-in support was no longer practical:

…we have had to face the fact that it is simply not cost-effective to support three different plug-in specifications on two different platforms, particularly given the increasing absence of standardization of host platforms we have observed over the past several years. Supporting our Max/MSP-based plug-in technology involves trying to make the entire Max environment run inside another host application. This was never a simple matter to begin with, and it has only grown more challenging with time.

It may indeed not make sense for Cycling to continue to provide this support. But it could be possible for others to support that – and, I hope, for us to someday have a better cross-platform plug-in standard, though that’s another discussion.

Alternative Plug-in Development Tools

There are other tools that are focused on plug-in development, and depending on your needs, they could fill the void left by Pluggo.

Here are just a few:

pdvst, free + open source, Windows

You know how Cycling is talking about how they have to run Max inside the host? That’s what this does for Pd. It looks like binarines are only available for Windows, but I see no reason this couldn’t be ported to other OSes, too. (I also remember some sort of solution for making LADSPA plug-ins with Pd, but maybe I just dreamed that.) I gave it a shot, and it’s actually quite nice.

Plogue Bidule, US$75, Mac + Windows

Plogue may actually come out on top as a cross-platform, commercial tool for building VST and AU plug-ins – only Reaktor here does that, and Plogue is quite a lot cheaper. ReWire works, too. That means Bidule will work with any host you like – even Reason – instead of just Live. If you only use Live, that may not matter, but if you use anything else … well, you get the point.

See our previous story: Plogue Bidule Modular Music App: Get Started, Meet the Creators

SuperColliderAU, free + open source, Mac

For people using the elegant sound coding language SuperCollider, you can now turn your creations into Audio Units, with full OSC control retained. Again, it’s quite easy to do.

SynthMaker, US$133-255, Windows

SynthMaker is tightly focused on instrument and effect creation, more narrowly-so than Max but as a result very powerful for the task. Also, if the Max for Live / Ableton combination doesn’t do it for you, SynthMaker is now included with FL Studio. It’s Windows-only, but you can develop plug-ins not only for FL but any Windows host.

SynthEdit, US$50 (shareware trial available), Windows

The gold standard of DIY plug-in creation, SynthEdit is actually sometimes notorious for its popularity (as in, “crappy SynthEdit plug-in). But don’t let that dissuade you: this is a powerful environment for making your own VSTs, and some truly brilliant instruments and effects have been created in it. There’s also some extensive documentation.

SonicBirth, free + open source, Mac

Why SonicBirth isn’t being widely used is really beyond me – maybe the death of Pluggo will wake people up to its potential. It’s a graphical patching environment for MIDI, audio, and instrument creation, it’s quite elegant to use, and it’s utterly free. The only bad news is, the open source version or promised commercial successor seem not to have gotten much development love lately.

Reaktor, $399 street (academic discount), Mac/Windows

Reaktor has the same limitation Max for Live does in that there’s no free runtime. But a Reaktor patch can run – and be edited live – inside any Mac or Windows host.

csLADSPA, free + open source, cross-platform

Still can’t figure out what this new-fangled Max thing is about when your CSound is working just fine? csLADSPA lets you write your own instrument and effects plug-ins in CSound and run them on any LADSPA host (it even works on Windows). Geeky, yes, but as I think about it, that’s pretty cool.

This is not an attempt to be a complete round-up, so anything I’ve left out, do let us know. I’m particularly interested to know how, say, SuperCollider or Pd users could target Mac, Windows, and Linux hosts.

Not Using Plug-ins

There is one … other alternative. Plug-ins have their uses, but everything Cycling is saying about the challenge of using them is absolutely true.

Ultimately, it’s worth thinking about why you’re using a plug-in. Do you just need to route audio or control from one place to another? Do you just want your strange, DIY step sequencer to sync with a track?

ReWire is one alternative, and Max continues to support ReWire.

But you can also use technology like JACK to route audio and (on Linux) sync and MIDI from place to place. In fact, while there are tools for creating your own LADSPA plug-ins on Linux, I don’t know anyone using them for this very reason – the support for jacking audio, sync, and control from place to place is so good, you can simply start your different music tools and you may not care that they’re not plug-ins.

Your Thoughts?

Okay, that story wound up being quite a bit longer than I had expected, but that’s the point – you have lots of alternatives. I’m curious to what you DIYers and patchers out there are imagining you’ll be spending your time doing over the coming months, whether it’s all Csound or all Max for Live.

It’s a tough time for the music tech industry like so many industries. But there are beautiful products coming from independent developers – indie, boutique shops crafting musical instruments in code. The folks at Devine Machine, makers of the likes of Guru and Lucifer, unloaded three big announcements overnight – enough to make you think there’s some obscure trade show going on at the end of March no one told you about.

Here’s the capsule view of why they matter:

OTR-88: A modeled electric piano

The beautiful thing about electric pianos like the Rhodes is that they’re really electromechanical instruments – amplified, yes, but entirely organic in the way they produce sound. OTR-88 is not the first attempt, as the developers imply, to use physical modeling techniques to try to reproduce those properties. Applied Acoustics’ Lounge Lizard, for instance, (available in Ableton Suite as Electric) follows similar lines. (Native Instruments’ Electric Piano and Digidesign’s Velvet have modeling approaches of their own, but also make use of samples.)

But OTR-88 does appear to go further. Tine movements are modeled in 3D. There are elaborate models of pickup interaction and velocity response. Herbie Hancock was consulted on the design. And you can adjust keys on a per-key basis. That should appeal to sound designers and electric piano aficionados alike. You can thank new physical modeling research by Efflam Le Bivic, one of Devine’s two developers.

I’m really eager to play this one.

OTR-88 Electric Piano

Krishna 1.5: Samples to Synthesis

The Krishna synth instantly earned respect for its “Frame Synthesis” approach, which makes it atypically easy to turn recorded samples into oscillators – a hybrid approach that threatens to end forever the synthesis versus sampling debate. 1.5 has a rebuilt engine, more LFO and ADSR routing destinations, and this tasty-sounding feature:

‘Snap to harmonics’ option for the filter : each note will instantiate a filter to resonate to its own harmonic.

Krishna Synth

One Shot Recorder

OSR is a terrific-looking little tool that’s designed to grab sounds while you play them. Set a threshold, record, and OSR spits out ready-to-use samples. That makes setting up a quick sampling or multisampling session — times when you may have a whole mess of samples to record — much easier. The new release now supports standalone and more pg-in formats, has a decay control, automatic sample reordering, and a pretty new UI.

One Shot Recorder (OSR) Sample Capture

OSR looks like the dream tool for a big multisample creation. Sometimes you may just want to grab some quick, beat-synced samples. Not new, but related, Live Sync Recorder is a tempo-synced VST. Turn it on, and it just rolls, slicing up your audio into one or two bar loops.

I actually can’t believe I didn’t know about this – I expect to put this to use very, very soon.

Live Sync Recorder Free

If you like that, there’s a fancier version, too.

I’ve been waiting for the near-ubiquitous ExpressCard slot on laptops to see some audio goodness, so one of the more welcome announcements of NAMM is that there’s now finally an ExpressCard-enabled version of the Universal Audio platform. The UAD is a DSP platform for computers, with an emphasis on high-quality, boutique mastering and effects plug-ins, including some recent, familiar emulations of classic Roland and Moog gear. UA’s stuff really does sound great, and host support has been improving (look for the key words “latency compensation” in your host of choice). So it’s about time that laptop users get in on some of the fun the desktop users have had.

The surprise is, the UAD-2 SOLO doesn’t cost that much – $500 includes the card plus the “1176SE Compressor/Limiter, Pultec EQP-1A Equalizer, RealVerb Pro Room Modeler, and CS-1 Channel Strip.” That’s a premium over native plug-ins, but then you have access to other UA plugs later on. In other news, Antares and Manley Labs signed onto UA’s platform, so more stuff is coming.

And by the way, while the forums rip into the choice of DAW, this stuff will work everywhere – even, via RTAS, Pro Tools.

Universal’s stuff isn’t for everyone, but I’m pleased that laptop users are getting something more out of a slot on their machine. (You’ll find ExpressCard on most PCs and the MacBook Pro, as well.) I hope this is the first of more hardware to come.

http://www.uaudio.com/

Mastering – spoiled for choice? This means in mastering choices, you’ve got the UAD, IK’s T-RackS 3 announced at the end of last year, and iZotope’s Ozone 4 announced at NAMM. I’ll be talking to some folks in New York who know something about mastering (i.e., are not me). (One of them is a big Cubase fan, so I expect he’ll also be all over Cubase 5 – and he makes records that make real money, whereas I make records that go nicely with experimental modern dance.)

Each of these products goes a different direction, but the honest truth is almost any DAW will start you out with a pretty great selection of effects tools, and for a small chunk of change, you can add on with something like the UAD, T-RackS, and iZotope. None of this changes your actual skill level or the quality of your ears, but it does help keep your wallet from being the major barrier.

7.4.2 Announcement – download is right there [Digidesign]

That’s the good news. The bad news is, your plug-ins may not yet be along for the ride. Digidesign reports some current instruments and plug-ins may be “incompatible.” Based on other reports, I assume this means it’ll run, but may either cause instability or sub-par audio performance.

Digi is maintaining a plug-in compatibility page for Leopard.

Here’s the other bad news news: for the most part, that’s just plug-ins that Digidesign ships directly. Some of them at least have updates, but some of Digi’s flagship instruments (Hybrid, Strike, Structure, Velvet, and others) are awaiting updates as of press time. Your third-party plug-ins require a whole separate set of compatibility checks.

At least what we’re generally hearing from readers is that the situation is getting better, not worse. I’m still far from being able to recommend Leopard, however, especially given the fact that Tiger remains such an adequate OS. Update: Digidesign tells us that they’ll be monitoring other third-party plug-ins on that page, as well.

FireWire Fixes (Non-Digidesign)

Via PowerPage, some users of Leopard are having FireWire connection dropouts. At least for this issue, though, there are some suggested fixes. The symptoms, as reported at MacFixIt:

After the installation of software updates, the FireWire ports on various Mac models may cease to properly function, not recognizing devices or exhibiting other issues. For some users, this has occurred with printer driver updates and for others it has occurred with the latest QuickTime update. One MacFixIt reader reinstalled Leopard and the problem still occurred.

FireWire connection dropouts: more fixes [MacFixIt]

That’s a pretty nasty issue, but it sounds different than the intermittent audio issues users here were reporting, so I don’t know how widespread it is or whether it’s related to problems CDM readers have had.

I’ve actually seen less documentation of the audio issues, which means, brave CDM readers – it’s up to you. You’re the ones pushing your Mac’s audio. So if you are still having issues, even with current drivers and 10.5.3, be sure to let us know exactly what your hardware and software configuration is.

Slicing, remixing, looping, "live performance-oriented features" … this is Digidesign we’re talking about, right? Digi’s Advanced Instrument Research (A.I.R.) unit, the fruits of the acquisition of Wizoo, may have a pretentious name, but they’ve been doing some pretty great work on new instruments. The new project, Transfuser, will have to enter some crowded waters. Loop slicing and handling already works pretty nicely in Ableton Live (especially with Live 7’s drum racks), in instrument form in FL Studio 8’s awesome Edison and Slicex, and in tools like fxpansion’s GURU. (Superficially, at least, Transfuser bears more than a passing resemblance to the latter in its overall UI layout. And then there’s the fact that the knobs look like they were lifted directly from Live.)

Of course, Transfuser isn’t for FL Studio users. As with previous AIR releases, the Digi-owned Wizoo now make plug-ins for Pro Tools only. And if you are a Pro Tools user, you don’t have to listen to me or try to squint at the screenshots: you can take Transfuser for a test drive free. Download the plug-in for Pro Tools (LE/HD/M-Powered) before June 25, and it’ll operate for three months, no restrictions.

Transfuser Preview [Digidesign]

I can already see from these shots that this isn’t quite the way I’d want to work, personally, let alone enticing enough to make me deal with Pro Tools as a host. But "groove-making" is different for different people, so I’d be very eager to hear what someone else thinks. If you’d like to write up a mini-review for CDM, let us know.

How do you make the Moog legacy of instruments accessible — assuming you can’t afford a studio full of vintage gear? One choice is to model the instruments virtually, as developers like Arturia have done. That provides real-time control, but models may not be perfect, and if you want more than one instrument, you really need more than one model. Others have reimagined some of the Moog sound designs on more modern instruments, as Craig Anderton did recently with Cakewalk’s Rapture.

IK Multimedia, working with veteran sample house Sonic Reality in collaboration with Moog Music, have taken the “museum” approach — put samples of everything in a single box. And what an ambitious collection they’ve got, as we noted when the product was announced. But can you win over even someone who owns some of the real gear? We put that question to our own Lee Sherman, who’s been diving deep into the tool. Mindful of the tradeoffs, he’s got some insight into just how useful they were able to make that sampled content.

SampleMoog can’t help but be greeted with some degree of skepticism. Even virtual analog synths like Arturia’s Minimoog V don’t go all of the way in reproducing the Moog experience. How can something based on samples even come close?

Moog users have always valued pure analog sound and the ability to shape that sound in real-time — the opposite of what you get from a digital, sampled library full of presets. Moog synth layouts are intuitive and interactive, and can produce any sound you want, in real-time — a capability so respected Moog users will even consider the latest Moog model without preset memory. Sample packages, even one as extensive as this, are limited by disk space to certain pre-determined sounds.

But having recognized what SampleMoog is not, let’s talk about what SampleMoog is: the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of Moog samples ever assembled, representing nearly every product that wore a Moog badge, from the early modulars to the Little Phatty. Historians, rejoice: there are over 1,700 basses, leads, pads and effects on offer here, including such relative esoterica as Taurus Bass pedals and the first Etherwave Theremin. Many of these instruments are quite hard to get a hold of in working condition, and they’re getting rarer by the day. There’s no question that IK are doing a service to the music community just by preserving these samples.

What You Get

SampleMoog is a 16-part, multi-timbral sample-based synth that can be used stand-alone or as a VST, AU, or RTAS plug-in on the Mac or PC. It includes a powerful synth engine with filters, envelopes, and LFOs and a competent, if not particularly exciting, effects section, with 32 effects (up to 4 effects per part).

Regular readers will know how we feel about dongles so we’re encouraged by the lack of one here. After installing from one CD-ROM and a DVD-ROM you can run the program in demo mode for a generous 10 days before authorizing it with the supplied serial number.
SampleMoog is based on IK’s SampleTank 2.5 engine, but adds a Moog-inspired 24dB-per octave lowpass filter with two AHDSR Envelopes (one devoted to amplitude and the other to filter and pitch). Combined with two LFOs (with a choice of triangle, square, saw, sine or random) waveforms, you’ve got more Moog-like filtering and modulation, without being too slavish an imitation. There are also bandpass and highpass filters with 6dB, 12dB, or 24dB slopes for variety. Velocity, Range, and Macro controls, and the ability to save layers and splits as Combis, provide more control over the final sound than is usually seen in a soundware package.

The software also looks looks great, with Moog-style knobs and switches and lots of wooden trim.

Putting it to Use

As you might expect given Sonic Reality’s involvement with the project, the sounds themselves have been meticulously sampled and the realism factor is high. Highlights here include the increasingly rare Taurus bass pedals, which are just as dark and menacing as I recall from the prog-rock of the 70s, the Rogue (the first synth I ever paid for with my own money), and an incredibly useable theremin (with just the right amount of portamento and modwheel-induced vibrato). The advantage of sampling these instruments is unparalleled authenticity — at least for the timbres sampled. While arguments rage over which virtual analog really nails the Moog sound, here that argument is moot since you’re listening to the actual sounds.

As is always the case with sampling versus modeling, though, the trade-off for having those literal recordings of a variety of instruments is control.  It all comes down to how the sounds were sampled in the first place. While SampleMoog does give you access to certain parameters, these parameters are baked into the recording and there are some you simply can’t affect. There’s also no way to capture some of the more esoteric qualities of analog synths such as the subtle detuning that comes from analog drift. This is hard for modelers, too, but at least some of these details can be incorporated into a model; samples are more static by definition.

As a concession to the tweaks, the software also includes a folder full of raw waveforms taken from the Minimoog that you can run through the filters and effects to come up with your own sounds. While welcome, it still felt limited compared to what you can do on a real Moog, largely due to the lack of routing possibilities. Ed.: that could get more interesting, though, as hosts like Native Instruments’ Kore become almost semi-modular — I could see this making an interesting sampled oscillator source.

Conclusions

Despite my initial snobbism, I have to confess that SampleMoog won me over in the end. This is clearly a package that has been put together with a great deal of love and respect for Moog’s legacy. The programmers were necessarily limited by the sampling medium. Because of that, rather than provide a completely open-ended palette for sound design as you’d found on an actual Moog synth, their choices as to how to shape certain sounds define the program. Moogs have been used in many musical contexts, funk, prog, and electro to name but a few. So a package like this must necessarily encompass the choices made several decades worth of Moog programers. Not to worry. Fortunately, their choices are for the most part excellent, and are entirely usable in today’s musical context.

All reservations aside, short of sampling my own Moog hardware, this is perhaps the best way I can think of preserving the legacy of these incredible instruments.

Sample Moog
US$329 list

Be sure to watch our interview with Craig Anderton on why it’s important to preserve the Moog legacy, and how you can help by supporting The Bob Moog Foundation.

Craig Anderton’s Tribute to Moog: Rapture Presets, and a Call to Save History (specifically, part II of our video interview)

IK Multimedia is also working with the Moog Foundation with SampleMoog, so in addition to giving money or volunteering effort to the Foundation, buying and using SampleMoog also gives support to this worthy cause. See the original announcement of the collaboration, reproduced at EQ Magazine.

Sound modules of yesteryear rarely earn much love today: now that we’re spoiled for choice with soft synths, ROMplers are unlikely to inspire the same passion. Not so with the E-MU Proteus. These rack modules of sounds were virtual candy stores for sound lovers, beloved by composers and musicians for their broad range of perfectly-crafted sound sets. If you’re an E-MU lover, there’s just no real substitute for some of these sounds.

That means the latest news from Cakewalk should get your attention, whether you’re an old Proteus pro or discovering these for the first time:

E-MU Proteus Pack

For a trip down memory lane:
Proteus 1/2/3 modules at Vintage Synth Explorer
Cakewalk actually got the producer of the original Proteus sound set, Timothy Swartz (now of Digital Sound Factory), to do the sound design. The library uses Cakewalk’s Dimension Pro sampler, so it runs on Mac, Windows, VST, AU, RTAS (for Pro Tools), the lot — and supports 64-bit Windows, as well. If you buy a module, you even get a download of the quite-nice LE flavor of Dimension free.

In the lineup:

• Proteus 2000: Multi-Purpose Professional Sounds
• Mo’ Phatt: Hip Hop / Urban
• Xtreme Lead 1: Dance/Electronica
• Planet Earth: World
• Virtuoso 2000: Orchestral
• PX-7: Drums Percussion

Pick any one a la carte for US$79 or get the whole set for US$299.

I’m downloading these now to review them. Since I get to talk about this before the review, I’d love some feedback. Anything you’d like me to look at specifically for the review? Any sound libraries you’re interested in? Or have you moved on from E-MU to bigger and better things? (Or maybe you’d rather eBay some hardware…)

Software samplers are hardly in short supply, but Digidesign is hoping you’ll pony up extra to add a sampler especially built for Pro Tools. The pay-off in Digidesign’s new Structure sampler is extra integration: you can drag and drop audio Regions directly from a Pro Tools session into Structure, and you can control Structure with Pro Tools control surfaces as well as with MIDI.

Digidesign Structure Product Page

The other features here are mostly typical, but you do get an impressive sound library, with 20 GB of soundware from EastWest and A.I.R., including Quantum Leap Orchestral Elements; if you want more, you can upgrade to 40 GB of sound in EastWest’s Structure-ready library Goliath. Also interesting: unlimited nestable patches, plus 8-channel interleaved samples. At US$499 list, that’s a pretty compelling deal.

This is not Digidesign’s first sampler; the company helped build the market for computer-based samplers with its SampleCell product. If you happen to have a copy of the software version (discontinued some time ago), you can upgrade for US$199 for a limited time. Sounds like that does not include owners of more ancient SampleCell PCI hardware. (Too bad; I know a few lying around!)

Of course, while Structure is the one sampler from Digidesign, it’s not your only choice. Native Instruments’ Kontakt is an extremely powerful sampler, and like Structure, includes an RTAS plug-in for Pro Tools use, just to name one competitor. Unlike Structure, Kontakt and others also include native VST/AU plug-ins for other hosts, so you’ll probably want to skip Structure if you regularly swap DAW software. Then again, most people I talk to are pretty loyal to one DAW, and Pro Tools integration, combined with the good stuff Digi’s recently-acquired soft synth group has been coming up, could put you over the top.

I’m too much invested in native software like Live and Logic to do a proper review of Structure (hey, one person can’t — or shouldn’t — try do everything.) But if any of you Pro Tools users are thinking of getting it and want to write it up, drop me a line.

How many times can you hear the same delays and filters and reverbs over and … over … again? The developers at DaevlMakr promise a more “organic” quality by employing unusual combinations of techniques and adding a little chance to the flow in their Daevl.Plugs suite. I’ve been meaning to talk about their work for some time (and, of course, they’re evidently CDM readers). I’m adding them to some projects now, but in the meantime, here’s an initial preview. And I’ve gotten some additional feedback from our recent contributor addition, Liz Knight aka Quantazelle, who has met the developers and been toying with the sounds.

First, the lineup:

Daevl.Plugs (Info, sound samples, screenshots)

1. daevl.cerberus: “Three delays in a feedback network, with distortion via self frequency modulation plus time-shifting on each channel.” Think multi-tap/delay feedback with a timbral twist.
2. daevl.cubedriver: Bitcrusher + pitch shifter + stereo delay = swirling digital mayhem. You’ll know the effect when you hear it, but it’s still not something you’ll find included in a Pro Tools bundle.
3. daevl.hilbertspace: “Three Hilbert-Transform ring modulators in a dual mono delay network.” Glitchy, digital ring mod.




4. daevl.noise: “Three channels of pitched noise and single channel of filtered white noise”, enveloped by the source. Lovely, sculpted noise, which I imagine you could mix in either liberally or conservatively and use any number of ways.
5. daevl.sixcylinder: A network of oscillators creates an effect reminiscent of ring mod and other mod effects, but more complex: “Three dual-mono amplitude oscillators in a cat’s cradle delay network.”
6. daevl.threep: “Networked pitch shifters in motion, with random pitch sweeps every n seconds, specified by portamento time.” Crazy sweeping things. Can’t really describe it more than that.
7. daevl.triad: “Three pitch class filters with selectable Q, cross-channel frequency modulation, overdriven distortion on each channel, followed on the composite out by a smoothly randomizing 5 band EQ peak synchronized to the source signal.” In other words, it either does subtler random EQ effects or, if you prefer, eats your tracks alive.
8. daevl.triphase: Phase delays with unusual routing options and audio-rate modulation for distortion.
9. daevl.triptych: Three parallel graphic multiband filters with time-shifting and feedback — arguably the most useful here, and definitely not what you normally find in your plug-in kit.

Liz Knight gives us her take on them, having worked with them a bit in FL Studio:

Everything was created with Pluggo, so if you don’t have Max MSP you’ll have to download the Pluggo runtime (free)

Win: http://www.cycling74.com/downloads/pluggo
Mac: http://daevlmakr.com/downloads/daevlplugs/pluggoruntime361.dmg

My favorites are the Cubedriver—it bitcrushes and pitch-shifts audio based on where it is in the stereo delay loop. It really gives the audio a kind of 8-bit edge, but more controlled.

Hilbertspace is also nice—it combines ring modulation with delay and adds a crunchy metallic overtone to the audio.

Triad kicks ass—it’s overdrive distortion plus a randomizing EQ that syncs to the source signal. *liz makes the rock fist

Although FL Studio isn’t listed in the compatible applications, I got them to work just fine within it.
Sometimes the variables are labeled enigmatically and it’s not clear what a modification does, and you just have to pull down every setting and sort of reverse engineer it a bit to figure out what’s going on. Most of them have easily discernible names (r_dly right delay, r_fbright feedback etc), though. I sort of wish there were more presets so that it’s easier to figure out the kind of scope of transformation you can achieve with each plugin.

The demo versions feature a burst of pink noise every minute, but registering them turns it off. For US$36 bucks, it’s pretty cheap to do so and they are neat little toys with a lot of flexibility and some nice audio mangling ability.

I think perhaps they should provide an option to turn the pink noise burst back on.

Good stuff, and an excellent demonstration of the sonic range possible with Max/MSP. (In fact, even for MSP patchers, this could serve as nice inspiration alongside your own creations.)

If you use them, as well, let us know what you think.

They’ve also created The 5 Way Path, a little invitation to use a single, 5-sample loop pack to create songs — the idea being you’ll have to overcome that limitation to see just how much variety is possible. There’s already a great lineup of tracks.

Developed a plug-in? Got one you love? Always feel free to send it.

Applied Acoustics make some of my favorite instruments. Their Lounge Lizard, Ultra Analog, and String Studio instruments are ones I’m always coming back to for their organic feel. So I’m going to take it as a sign that the week I finally get an Intel MacBook, they deliver Intel-native versions. My sets for next week at Macworld is secure.

Full impressions of these instruments on the MacBook — they do tend to be pretty CPU-hungry as they’re modeling-based — in an upcoming Core Duo roundup. In the meantime, here’s what’s new, beyond bug fixes:

1. Intel-based Mac systems support—Universal Binary
2. New RTAS plug-ins for both Windows and Mac OS X
3. New total recall of 128-program bank in any host sequencer
4. Full MIDI Program Change support
5. MIDI Pitch Bend and Channel Pressure (mono aftertouch) messages support in MIDI Links
6. Redesigned Edit MIDI Links dialog
7. Omni MIDI channel
8. New restore factory preset library command
9. New Chord mode, improved Latch mode in arpeggiator
10. Improved Latch mode in arpeggiator

This corrects a number of the minor issues I’d had. Unfortunately, the update is not free if you purchased before September 1; it’s US$29 per instrument or US$49 if you have the full modeling collection. That seems reasonable for Intel Mac owners, but it’s too bad PowerPC owners can’t get the bug fixes free.

Tassman 4 is still on its way for some time in 2007. This is further proof that music developers have had a tough transition getting ready for Intel on the Mac. 2007 looks like an easier year than 2006.

Applied Acoustics Technology Update