Musicians: Beware the Lion

Apple released Lion today, and demonstrated once again that they really don’t care about the subset of their customers who use Apple computers to make music. Reports are rolling in of all sorts of things not working under Lion, including both hosts and plug-ins. Chris is testing our stuff and the major hosts today and posting his findings here. There’s also a report here at a site I’ve never heard of before today.

Long story short is that if you’re a musician, you may want to wait a bit before moving to OS 10.7. read more

Announcing Panstation

Don’t ask me why it’s taken me several days to mention that we’ve released Audio Damage’s latest product. It’s called Panstation; it’s destined to be the last word in auto-panner plug-ins. It does a fine job on tremolo effects also. We modeled the entire panning portion of the Drawmer M500 dynamics processor, gave it some extra modulation waveforms and a couple other nifty tricks, added the trigger-counting feature of the Audio & Design PanScan, and put in the stuff to make it at home in a contemporary DAW such as MIDI control and tempo sync. read more

Audio Damage 2.0

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As Chris announced today on his blog, Audio Damage is branching out. Specifically we’re starting to design and manufacture modules for the Euro-Rack modular synthesizer format. Our first product will be a 2-in/2-out USB1.1 class-compliant audio interface. It’s compatible with the iPad, so you can use it to conveniently add just about any iPad audio app to your Euro-Rack modular rig. Of course it will also work with a laptop or desktop computer. Hence you can use it as a convenient way to route audio between your DAW (or other audio software) and your modular. It also has DC-coupled outputs so you can use it to control your modular with software like the Silent Way suite from Expert Sleepers or Volta by MOTU, or by generating signals via your own devising with something like Max/MSP or Reaktor. read more

Audio Damage Updates Eos

I’ve been remiss in mentioning that we’ve put out an update for Eos, our high-quality algorithmic reverb plug-in. This update gives Eos a visual makeover, fixes a number of problems with the AudioUnit version, and provides a 64-bit version for Windows users. The update is free for registered users.

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A Glowing Review of Phosphor

(Yes, some puns just have to be made.) AudioNewRoom posted a review of Phosphor, describing it as “among the most useful and inspiring virtual instruments on the market today.” The reviewer also described Audio Damage as “a company of truly inspired developers”. Aw, shucks. Thanks, ANR!

Announcing Phosphor

How about starting the new year with a new instrument from Audio Damage? Now available on our website is Phosphor, our first polyphonic synthesizer plug-in.

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Phosphor traces its roots to the alphaSyntauri synthesizer, a ground-breaking synthesizer introduced in 1979. The alphaSyntauri used an Apple ][ computer for its user interface; sound generation was handled by hardware. It offered a glimpse of the power of additive synthesis at a price more or less affordable by someone who found an Apple ][ more or less affordable. I’m old enough to remember poring over an article in BYTE magazine about the alphaSyntauri, but I never actually used one. Our inspiration and reference for constructing Phosphor was a complete alphaSyntauri system that Chris assembled from eBay finds. read more

Axon Updated

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We’ve released an update to Axon, numbered version 1.1.1. If you have either version 1.0 or 1.1 you should get this update. It corrects a fairly annoying problem with Axon’s synchronization to the DAW’s transport which (cough, cough) was introduced in version 1.1 when we added the reset-on-stop feature. (Yeah, I know. Sorry. However, I believe this marks the first time in the seven-year/two-dozen-plus-products history of the company in which we’ve had to release an update to correct an error in an update, so I think we’re doing pretty well in this regard.) It also fixes a somewhat mysterious problem with preset menus present in some versions of Cubase on Windows and Cakewalk products. This is a very odd problem and we’re not completely convinced that we’ve solved it once and for all, but I can say that it solves the problem on my particular version of Cubase, Windows, the phase of the moon, etc. The problem doesn’t actually hinder usage of the plug-in in any way, so it’s a pretty minor issue. read more

Announcing Replicant 1.5

We’ve just released an update to Replicant, our wildly popular (and popularly wild) beat-slicing/mangling plug-in. Version 1.5 gives Replicant a user-interface makeover (replacing the moldy look of the original version, as Chris called it), adds triggering with MIDI note messages, and MIDI control to the AudioUnit version. The MIDI triggering is quite fun, if I may say so myself. This is a free update for existing users. You’re welcome.

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Click here to visit the Audio Damage website and learn more about Replicant, hear some audio samples, watch a video, get your free update, and/or buy yourself a copy. read more

Discord 3 Review Online

There’s a nice review of Discord 3 here. It’s one of the few I’ve read that takes the time to put the product in historical context. If you’ve ever wondered why we build pitch shifters that aren’t attempted Auto-Tune clones, the review contains the answer.