A granular soundscape workstation: load a sample (or capture one live), and play a drifting granular cloud keytracked across the keyboard — grown into a full 7-page instrument with professional-grade modulation, effects, and preset tooling. This is a beta release for a small group of testers — feedback from this round shapes the road to a full 1.0.
Added — Core engine
- •Granular playback engine with automatic seamless-loop detection, blending multiple candidate loop regions per sample rather than committing to one.
- •Up to 3 independently-layered samples per patch, each with its own keyrange, loop bounds, volume/mono/reverse controls, and mod-targetability.
- •Live-input capture: press-to-record up to ~30 seconds directly from the plugin's input bus into any layer — indistinguishable from a file-loaded sample to the engine.
- •Per-grain randomization (pitch/gain jitter, 4 window shapes, reverse-grain probability), a drone/pad-friendly keytrack-amount control, and a freeze mode.
- •Extreme upward pitch-shifting reads from a band-limited mip pyramid instead of aliasing; genuinely stereo sources read true left/right content, not a panned mono derivative.
- •Four quality tiers — Performance, Eco, Balanced, Full — trading CPU load against grain density, so Texture scales from a modest laptop up to a large multi-instance session.
Added — 7-page UI (MAIN · SYNTH · EFFECTS · FILTERS · MOD · OUTPUT · RENDER)
- •Persistent header (preset browser, page tabs, master meter) over one shared parameter state — no page switch ever resets anything, and every page is fully automatable and preset-recallable.
- •MAIN: the Grain Field hero, granular controls, and a drag-and-drop signal-chain router (reorder Filter/Gate/Delay/Reverb/EQ freely, click to bypass, double-click to open).
- •SYNTH: three sub-tabs — Generators (one-shot recipes for building or reshaping a layer's source material from scratch), Grain Character (per-grain filter shaping, including Diode and Moog ladder models), and Texture FX (see Effects below).
- •On-knob modulation visualization sitewide — see at a glance what's modulating what, live.
- •Native vector UI ("Dark Glass / Neon Depth"), embedded typefaces (not system-font-dependent).
Added — Effects
- •3-band parallel/series multimode filter bank with character types and per-band output trim.
- •Rhythmic 16-step gate with a full step-editor.
- •Tempo-syncable delay; reverb including a real pitch-shifted Shimmer mode.
- •8-band parametric output EQ (bell/shelf/HP/LP/notch per band) with draggable nodes, plus an output compressor with gain-reduction metering, stereo width, and master gain.
- •Texture FX — a fixed-order six-module chain after the reorderable rack, each independently enabled: String Resonator (rings the granular cloud through tuned strings — Wood/Glass/ Metal/Nylon materials, keytrackable via the mod matrix, every gain bounded by construction), Slice Sequencer (a tempo-synced beat-repeat that chops the timeline into 1/4–1/32 slices and repeats, reverses, half-speeds or drops them, with a bar-locked pattern by default), Glitch Processor, Upward Compressor (lifts quiet detail rather than taming loud), Spectral Pan, and Masking Reducer.
Added — Modulation
- •34 modulation sources → 188 destinations across 16 routing slots, each with bipolar depth and a per-slot response curve. Sources: 4 tempo-syncable LFOs across 9 shapes, 2 envelopes, 8 renameable macros, the rhythmic gate, 5 generative (chaos / Euclidean / locked-random / ratchet / probability), 4 audio-reactive (threshold gate / transient / sidechain follower / pitch follower), and 10 performance sources (velocity, mod wheel, aftertouch, key follow, pitch bend, expression, breath, sustain pedal, note gate, per-note random).
- •Destinations cover every continuous parameter that shapes the sound, including the full Texture FX chain, the per-grain Grain Character filter, the master EQ's per-band frequency and Q, the TextureVerb-only controls, all 16 rhythmic-gate step levels, and the per-layer sample trims.
- •The matrix can modulate itself — LFO rates, envelope ADSR, macro values, and every generative / audio-reactive source's own parameters are destinations, so an envelope can open a macro that opens eight things, or an LFO can accelerate another LFO.
- •Right-click to wire, in both directions. Right-click any knob → "Add modulation source" (a grouped picker of all 34, with a "Remove modulation" list of whatever already drives it). Right-click any modulation source on the MOD page → "Assign to" (a grouped picker of all 185). Both find or create the routing slot for you; the destination picker ghosts anything whose owning block is currently bypassed.
- •Per-slot layer targeting — any modulation slot can address one specific sample layer instead of always affecting all layers identically.
Added — RENDER page
- •Offline-bounces the whole live patch — not one note in isolation, the entire performance — to a tempo-synced, loop-ready file, in a single-note or multi-note batch pass.
- •Exports WAV or AIFF with embedded loop points and WAV ACID metadata, so the result drops straight into a sampler or DAW already loop-ready. Bit depth, sample rate, and mono/stereo are all chosen at render time.
Added — Presets & reliability
- •128-preset factory library, 14 in each of the nine musical categories plus 2 Init templates. Every rhythmic preset carries a real 16-step gate pattern and tempo-locked movement (the generator renders each one and fails the build if a gated preset does not actually chop by at least 12 dB). Pitch modulation is deliberately rare — 8 of 128 — and always quantised to exact intervals, so it transposes correctly across the whole keyboard rather than sounding like a sweep. The rhythmic and FX categories also drive the Slice Sequencer at a subdivision deliberately different from the gate's, so the two rhythms interlock rather than doubling each other.
- •Categorised, tagged preset library (
.txpreset) and bundle export/import (.txbank), with Quick Save / Save As / Clear, Create Init, and Set As Template. - •Crash and session logging (a symbolized report on any crash, plus a rolling session log) with a one-click "Show logs" button, for fast turnaround on any bug report.
- •In-app bug reporting, direct from the plugin.
Added — Documentation
- •In-plugin user guide. A book button in the header opens a guide to the screen you are on, with every section and control explained; a rail switches to any other screen's guide without losing your place.
- •Standalone tempo. A BPM field in the header of the standalone app. There is no host to ask for a tempo when running as an app, so every tempo-synced feature — delay and gate sync, the synced LFOs, the generative sources, the Slice Sequencer, and the RENDER page's bar length — previously ran at a fixed 120 BPM. Not saved into presets, so loading one never changes your tempo; ignored entirely in a DAW, where the host's tempo wins.
- •User manual. A full PDF manual covering every page.
Fixed
- •A silent DC offset could latch in the Shimmer reverb and pin the output meter at maximum indefinitely. Its pitch-shifted feedback loop had no DC blocker, and the loop's DC gain could exceed unity, so any rectified asymmetry from the granular cloud ran away and stuck there — audible as nothing at all, but leaving the meter at full scale and a large DC offset on the output that survived note-off and would have poisoned anything downstream in a DAW. It affected 17 of the 128 factory presets. The delay's feedback path had the same defect at over-unity feedback settings. Both fixed; the delay's intended over-unity self-oscillation is unchanged.
Notes
- •Windows only at this release (VST3 + Standalone); no AU or macOS build yet.
- •
pluginval --strictness-level 10 clean. - •This is a beta — access is limited to approved testers via VST.Tools; it is not a public release yet. In-app bug reports and the "Show logs" button both reach the team directly.