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This free multiband bitcrusher is a surgical tool for lo-fi sound design.

If you like your sounds distorted, degraded and loaded with lo-fi character, then the humble bitcrusher is your friend.

By reducing the bit depth and sample rate of a signal, this audio effect produces crunchy textures, gritty timbres and artifacts reminiscent of vintage digital gear: it’s a powerful tool for creative sound design, capable of achieving everything from subtle fuzz to total sonic destruction.

Many DAWs have a stock bitcrusher onboard, like Ableton Live’s Redux or Logic Pro’s Bitcrusher, but these tend to be on the simpler side. BIT LAYER, a new plugin from RiverFlux Audio, takes things to a different level, allowing you to precisely target your digital degradation with a multiband architecture, mid/side routing and tonal/transient processing. This adds up to more versatility than many paid-for bitcrusher plugins, and it’s totally free.

Bit Layer can dial in up to eight independent layers of processing, each with dedicated controls for bit depth, sample rate and jitter (all three can be reordered in the signal path) along with mute, solo, gain and dry/wet mix.

The plugin’s multiband functionality makes it possible to apply lo-fi texture in varying degrees and styles across the frequency spectrum, and this can be seriously useful for surgical sound design. You could crunch up the hi-hats in a drum loop while leaving the kick drum untouched, for example, or add some ear-catching grit to the high-end of a vocal without distorting the mids and lows.

The plugin’s targeting abilities extend beyond the frequency spectrum and into the stereo field, too: all three modules across each band have mid/side routing, so you’re able to apply the effect independently across mid (the sum of the left and right channels) or side (the difference between the two) channels.

There’s also tonal/transient splitting across each band, meaning that you can treat the transient (attack) portion of a signal independently to its sustained tonal content, once again opening up new possibilities for fine-tuned signal corruption.

All in all, this is a respectable amount of flexibility for a free plugin. If you’re looking for an upgrade to your DAW’s stock crusher but you’re not already in possession of one of the more full-featured paid-for options on the market, Bit Layer looks like a capable alternative.

RiverFlux Audio BIT LAYER is available now for Windows and Linux in VST3/CLAP formats, with AU support on macOS.

Head over to Gumroad to download the plugin.

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In the video, Mark Verbos introduces the Verbos Electronics Haas Zone Processor.

The Haas Zone Processor enables chorus, flange, phase cancellation, doubling, ADT, waveshaping and other effects.

At the core is a multi-tapped digital Delay Bank, largely influenced by vintage studio processors including the Marshall Time Modulator. Tap1 can be switched and swept from less than 1mS up to 20mS. Tap2 is chained from the output of Tap1, adding an additional 1mS-20mS. Tap3 ranges from 9-42mS. In addition to having their own full volume outputs, all 3 delay taps can be blended with the Dry input signal in a voltage controlled mixer.

Also included is a Bandpass filter, built from a 2 pole hi-pass followed by a 2 pole low-pass. Bandwidth can be swept from very narrow all the way to full bandwidth. Frequency can be swept across the full audio range and voltage controlled through a bipolar attenuator.

To the left is a Voltage Controlled Oscillator, similar to the modulation side of a Complex Oscillator. Included is a Triangle, Square and Sawtooth wave that range from 0-10v. The Frequency can sweep from more than 1 minute per cycle all the way up to audio range and tracks volt/octave.

There is an envelope Follower on the input and both it and the triangle output from the Oscillator are normalled to the c.v. inputs on the Delay Time. The output of Tap3 is normalled to the input of the Bandpass filter and the output of the Bandpass filter is normalled to the Feedback In. Through tweaking the Delay Time, Oscillator Frequency and Bandpass Frequency multiple resonance points can be accentuated.

The Haas Zone Processor is intended to be used as an effect, inside a patch as waveshaper or as a voice on its own.

The Verbos Electronics Haas Zone Processor is available now with a street price of about $800 USD.

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Synthesist Ian Dixon shared this video intro to his free Roland D-50 Editor Librarian.

The Librarian is a browser-based Web MIDI tool for backing up, browsing, importing and editing D-50 sounds, without sending your patch data to the cloud.

Video Summary:

“In this video, I show the full workflow from the YouTube transcript: connecting the D-50 over MIDI, enabling SysEx, reading the current edit buffer, opening a patch library, sending sounds to the synth, receiving a full bulk dump from the D-50, saving a library backup, importing SysEx banks, and editing classic D-50 patches such as Fantasia. The editor also makes it easier to work with the D-50’s upper and lower tones, partials, PCM and synthesis structures, ring modulation, filter and amp envelopes, reverb, tuning and patch management.

The aim is to give the Roland D-50 a modern librarian/editor workflow: build a large library of card sounds and custom patches, search for sounds quickly, send patches to the edit buffer when recording, and avoid constantly swapping cards or managing small internal banks by hand.”

The Roland D-50 Editor Librarian is available now as a free, browser-based application.

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