Circa, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Loop...

After we released Enso, which is basically the looper Adam and I always dreamed of, a full creative looping environment with a deep workflow and abilities that were, at the time, unique in the plugin world, we quickly got tired of trying to explain Frippertronics and disintigration loops to people that just wanted to loop some beats like Saro does with the RC-505. "Well, no, you can't do that but you CAN make these dope-ass ambient guitar noodles! Look! Decoupled play and record heads!" 

The solution, in our naive minds, was "let's make another looper!" Let me tell you from hard-won experience that adding UX features to your looper by making another looper is, perhaps, not the sort of idea that will lead to sleeping easily. Circa was born 16 months later, and it was the kind of baby that comes out with a big head and hair and the mother is resentful for the damage this big head baby caused. Every once in a while, we would wade back in to the DSP code, chasing clicks and weird edge cases. This would leave us exhausted and vaguely upset that you users couldn't just get your act together and stop breaking our big-headed baby. 

Earlier this year, however, we had a major breakthrough with the looping engine of Enso, really cleaning things up and making it one of the better loopers around, in a results sort of way. Definitely the best of the weird loopers. Still weird, though. Much to our surprise, this major breakthrough really opened the floodgates on how we approach our looping DSP, and we were able to translate our new knowledge to what is, to date, the biggest "optimizations and bug fixes" update to a product in Audio Damage's 24-year history. We are very proud to present Circa v1.2. 

If there was a regulatory agency for looping software, we are certain we could get a "certified nearly click-free" rating. We are really rather pleased with ourselves, and I imagine the many Circa customers who have been waiting patiently will be pleased with ourselves as well. Circa has finally grown in to its big ol' head. If having little discontinuities in your loops was part of your performance ritual, I regret to inform you that Circa is now as silky-smooth as a super model's ass-cheek. Or so we assume, having no experience with super models. Along with this cheekiness, we managed to squeeze out some CPU cycles, especially when the UI is open. 

Aside from the many "optimizations and bug fixes," we added a couple new features. The most notable is probably the LFOs. Any mod source slot can now be an LFO instead of a MIDI controller if you'd prefer. The targets for the LFOs are limited to the continuous parameters in the layers that seemed to make sense, but this really expands Circa's horizons. 

At the end of the day, we feel that Circa has finally become the product we intended all along. We now look forward to your edge cases with anticipation, as you explore the new sonic science that Circa v1.2 opens up. 

Chris Randall
Bellows Falls, VT