Sound Guru

For the last year or so I’ve been working on an audio plugin (VST/AU). I will be releasing it as an early access beta in a matter of hours, and you’ll be able to get it here.

It will be at a discounted price for the moment, to reflect the fact that you will experience bugs. Of course, buying the beta version entitles you to updates (which will be frequent during the beta period) and the full version when it comes out. Please only buy the beta if you’re willing to accept that The Mangle may crash your host, and you may even lose saved work (within the Mangle that is, the rest of your project will be safe).

Additionally, I will endeavour not to break your presets with future updates, but I can’t guarantee that until version 1.0.

Operating systems & hosts

For the moment, The Mangle will only be available for Mac OS X as an Audio Unit and VST for ³²⁄₆₄ bit hosts. A Windows version will follow in the coming weeks - the only reason that I haven’t released it concurrently is that I’m flat broke and can’t afford a copy of Windows 8 to test on! [Update: Windows 7+ now supported.] Rest assured, the code is cross-platform, so it should just be a matter of compiling and testing in a few hosts.

I’m requiring OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion [Update: OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard now supported] and I may even require Windows 8 (though I hope to support 7). I realise there are still quite a lot of people on older OSes, but this is a technical decision relating to support for C++11.

Presets

This beta version contains only 4 factory presets. Partly that’s because I haven’t had time to make an extensive preset library, but it’s also because by its nature presets for the Mangle will require lots of high-quality audio. That will cost money, which I don’t have right now, so hopefully this early beta can furnish me with some funds to make a better library. Another issue is that granular synthesis doesn’t really lend itself all that well to presets. I’m expecting the Mangle to be used in an automation-heavy way, and it will probably be used most often to process specific samples from your projects.

The existing presets are purely there to demonstrate the kinds of things you can do with the Mangle. Bear in mind, though, that each preset actually contains up to 8 sounds, so in reality there are something like 14 sounds plus two keyboard-playable instruments included.

Reporting bugs / requesting features

This is a beta, so please, if it breaks let me know! Ideally you’d let me know your OS version, host and, the gold standard, a list of steps to reproduce the bug. Doing so will hugely increase the speed at which I can fix it.

As for feature requests, well knock yourself out. Lord knows there’s much that can be improved, and I’m very happy to hear suggestions, but be aware that the priority is to fix bugs and get the synth super stable in its current form. New features are a luxury for the moment.