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Noise Engineering has released three free audio plugins for macOS & Windows: the synths Sinc Vereor and Virt Vereor, a distortion effect, Ruina.

The company says that they have had lots of requests for plugins from existing customers, and they also want to make their products accessible to people without the barrier to entry of a modular system.

In addition to the free modules, they are planning plugin versions of some of their popular Eurorack modules.

Here’s what they say about each of the free plugins:

“Sinc Vereor packs a powerful punch into a tiny package. The intuitive and inviting controls will make sound design a breeze. Blend between familiar waveforms like saw, triangle, and square. Super mode adds 6 phase-offset oscillators. Use Noise mode to generate self-similar noise for percussion, effects, and more. The Vereor section is our easily manipulated dynamics section using an ADSR envelope controlling a variable slope and analog-inspired multimode gate/filter.

Add to that a vintage-inspired chorus and a library of presets. Loosely based on Noise Engineering’s beloved Eurorack module Sinc Iter, Sinc Vereor will astound with its versatility.

Virt Vereor is a powerful synthesizer that is as easy to use as it is unique and fun to play. Choose between a quadrature algorithm, a supersaw-inspired beast, or an additive algorithm with spectral control and distortion of partials. The Virt section is combined with the Vereor envelope/multi-mode gate/filter section and chorus. Virt Vereor makes a tremendous number of unique sounds with an immediate and usable interface.

Ruina is a creative stereo distortion plugin built on digital distortion algorithms. Run any sound through Ruina for warm, lush distortion, or crank the sliders to unleash complete destruction. Ruina has a wavefolder, a multiband saturator, a chaotic suboctave generator, octavizer, and phase shifter. It also features a notch or bandpass filter with adjustable tracking, and a control to set the order of the distortions in the signal flow to further customize your sound. Last but not least, Overdrive adds up to 128x gain for maximal destruction. With seven distortion types and fully automatable controls, it’s easy to turn your sounds into something new and unique with Ruina.”

The three plugins are available now as free downloads from the Noise Engineering website. Setting up an account on the site is required to download.

• Ruina

• Sinc Vereor

• Virt Vereor

Swiss-based music software company Samplab has introduced Samplab, a plugin that lets you edit and rearrange pitches in polyphonic audio samples.

Could the power of AI give you Melodyne-style editing for nothing?

Here’s what the developers say about the plugin:

“When you drag and drop an audio file into the plugin, it is sent to our server for processing. Once this is completed, you recieve the result with all the notes in the audio separated. In order to edit the notes, we generate a MIDI file that you can drag into the Samplab track.

From now on, the plugin acts like a virtual instrument: It gets the MIDI events as input from your DAW and plays the (edited) notes. If you don’t make any changes to the MIDI, the result should sound the same as the original audio. Of course, you can also just use the MIDI file for other things.”

Yesteryear, the idea that you could one day be able to edit the individual notes in a polyphonic audio sample seemed like a pipedream. Then Melodyne Direct Note Access technology came along, providing exactly that kind of functionality. Now, thanks to the power of AI, Samplab puts this functionality into a free plugin.

Though it is not as sophisticated as Melodyne, but the Samplab demo is still very impressive.

Import a sample into one of your DAW’s audio tracks, open the plugin on a MIDI track and then drag the sample into it. The individual notes are then displayed in your piano roll ready for editing.

As processing is done on the Samplab server, therefore, it requires an internet connection to work. Samplab is currently limited to editing samples with a maximum of 127 notes. Though only short samples can be separated, but the developers say that they are working on adding support for longer audio files.

Samplab runs in VST/AU formats on Windows and Mac, and is available now as a free download from the Samplab website.

Joakim Frostegård has introduced OctaSine, a free and open source FM VST2 synthesizer plugin that the developer say “draws inspiration from the Elektron Monomachine, as well as from NI’s FM8”.

Features:

• Works on macOS, Windows and Linux
• Four operators with independent parameters such as volume, panning, modulation index, feedback, three different frequency modifiers (ratio, free and fine) and ADSR volume envelope parameters. The operators can be independently switched to white noise mode
• Flexible routing allowing setting the output operator (with some limitations) as well as the percentage of signal that is simply added to the final output, enabling additive synthesis. By default, operator 4 is routed to operator 3, operator 3 to operator 2 and operator 2 to operator 1.
• Modulation panning (!), not present in FM8
• Master volume and master frequency parameters
• Four LFOs capable of targeting most operator parameters as well as most parameters of lower index LFOs.
• 128 voices
• Fully automatable
• Preset handling
• SIMD-accelerated audio synthesis with runtime feature detection for less CPU usage

OctaSine is available now as a free download. The source code is also available.