Quanta 2, Descent, and the Sky Valley algorithm in Other Desert Cities: three different angles on granular synthesis, what each one is actually for, and how to get the most out of them.

There are approximately four hundred thousand delay plugins in the world right now, give or take a few hundred thousand. Everybody and their dog has one. So naturally, we have two (or six, or possibly 30+, depending on how you count.) The question we get asked most often about our delay products (after "will you bring back Ronin," the answer to which is "probably not, but never say never") is "what's the difference between Dubstation 2 and Other Desert Cities, and which one should I buy?" This is a fair question, because on the surface they are both delay plugins made by the same two people using the same framework and sold on the same website. But they are, in...

If you're looking for the popular and free RoughRider 3 compressor, you've come to the right place! However, due to a series of events that, in retrospect, would be funny if it wasn't so annoying, we had to move it behind what is, for all intents and purposes, a paywall. The actual story is so dumb to relate that we'd be embarrassed actually putting you through the chore of reading it. But the tl;dr version is thus: some YouTube gamer put up a video showing that a particular game would be easier to play if one could hear footsteps better. He came up with a scaffolding of freeware to pull this off. Unfortunately, the game in question has about ten times...

Back in 2003 or so, when I was much younger and demonstrably dumber, I thought the hard part of having an audio software company would be having ideas for new products. Oh, those heady days of youth. One of the very, very few benefits of age is experience. And experience has taught us that the hard part of having an audio software company is, in fact, keeping the products you already have working. While I tell people I am a product designer (if I’m feeling magnanimous towards myself) or a UI designer (if I’m being realistic) or a UX designer (ditto masochistic), in point of fact the vast majority of my job is just getting things to build on the four...

It's that magical time of the year again, when we (and by "we" I mean literally everyone engaged in commerce of any sort) try to get you (and by "you" I include me) to buy things for less than they normally cost. Audio Damage is no exception to this. As has been the case for the last couple years, we try to line up our sale here on our website so it matches with Plugin Boutique's sale. As a result, it runs somewhat longer than we're really comfortable with, but we figure hey, PiB is bigger than us, so they must know something we don't. (Please note that Plugin Boutique is our only authorized reseller. If you see Audio Damage products for...

As you can plainly see, we have given the Audio Damage website a much-needed overhaul. Due to being a very small company with a relatively high product cadence, the things we find unpleasant (updating the website to name one example) tend to languish a bit when we are pursuing a far more entertaining goal like making a new product. Apologies for that! But be that as it may, here we are with a new look to our website, and some fairly significant changes.  Principally, we have decided to make the entire Audio Damage legacy catalog free for everyone (no beer necessary). This collection comprises 33 plugins, and encompasses the entire history of the company, all the way back to Mayhem,...

After Quanta's release last summer, Adam and I wanted to tackle something with a somewhat smaller scope. Quanta was a big project for two people to pull off, and we needed a bit of a break from grandiosity. So we decided to do Enso, our looper idea that we had originally designed as a Eurorack module and shown at Machines In Music in 2017. It went like this:  Me: "How hard would it be to do Enso as a plug?" Adam: "Pretty easy, actually. We've already done the design." Me: "Okay, let's do that!"  Oh, the blind faith of youthful endeavors! The general idea of looping (fill a buffer with sound, and play it over and over again) is pretty simple. But...

We are very pleased to announce Quanta, our new synthesizer for AAX, AU, VST, VST3, and iOS. Quanta is a 10-voice granular synthesizer built around an incredibly easy-to-use and capable granular engine, with a "sidecar" oscillator that can be used in addition to the granular source, or mixed in with it, or instead of it. Quanta has two multi-mode filters and a cross-platform preset mechanism, and can load AIFF, WAV, Ogg, FLAC, and MP3 format samples.  Modulation sources? Quanta's got 'em. Quanta features our new Flexible Envelope Generator (FEG), which is an arbitrary-length breakpoint generator with optional host tempo sync. Easily add and remove breakpoints, and set loop points and curves. These comically powerful envelope generators are essentially sequencers in their own...

One thing that has always been a point of mine is to move the UI design of our products away from PNG-flipping (called "filmstrips" in the music software UI business) and Photoshop asset farming and in to the purely procedural world. This first fascinated me some time ago. I believe the original Kombinat was the first product we had that had procedural controls, and once that was released, I generally moved to a scenario where the background and some buttons of the interface were image assets, but the knobs and meters were, in general, pure math.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, drawing something procedurally means doing it with math and drawing commands, on the fly, instead of...

Back in late December, we released a firmware update for Sequencer 1, version 1.5.0. This was the eighth update in the last couple of years, and while it wasn't the most exciting update we've put out, a behind-the-scenes look will show some of the thought processes that go into these updates. Firmware updates for the sequencer generally fall into two categories: big updates that contain exciting new features, and small updates which mostly fix bugs. We try to always add some small new feature to the latter sort. We figure that if you're going to go to the length of unracking your sequencer to update its firmware, it's far more fun if you get something new (even a small something)...