Skip to content

VXN 0.3.2

Latest
Latest

Choose a tag to compare

View all tags
@poetix poetix released this 30 Sep 09:13
0.3.2
0c01e5a

Hot patches sound a little cleaner. 0.3.2 fixes the saturation curve that both synths share. It was meant to follow tanh, a smooth S-curve, but it had a wrong coefficient. It ran slightly under the curve as a signal got loud, then jumped up by about 3 % at a fixed level. A jump like that adds a burst of harsh, wideband harmonics every time a waveform crosses it. Patches that drive the filter hard, run it at high resonance, or push the FX will lose some of that grit.

Will my patches sound the same?

They load and play exactly as before. Nothing about parameters, presets or saved sessions has changed. What changes is the sound of anything that drove the saturator past the old jump:

  • Quiet or clean patches: no difference. In gentle saturation, old and new curves agree to within 0.015 %. You will not hear it.
  • High drive, high resonance, self-oscillating filters: slightly cleaner. You lose the harsh edge from the jump and keep the saturation itself.
  • Overall level: effectively unchanged. The dynamics saturator makes up its own gain, so its output moves by at most 0.13 dB, and only in a narrow band of drive settings around 11–12 dB.

If a patch depended on that edge, raise its drive a little to bring some of it back.

VXN1b

The fix reaches every place VXN1b saturates:

  • the ladder filter's stages and its resonance feedback;
  • the diode ring;
  • the chorus's bucket-brigade write stage, when the signal going in is well over full scale;
  • the phaser's feedback;
  • the dynamics block's drive.

The ladder and diode ring used to top out 3 % below the other saturators. Now they all saturate at the same level. As a result, a self-oscillating ladder rings about 0.25 dB louder.

VXN2

VXN2 gets the same fix in its optional filter's drive and resonance, the phaser feedback and the dynamics drive. VXN2's reference render doesn't use any of these, so it is bit-identical to 0.3.1. The change is only in patches that do.

A useful side effect: VXN2's filter needs less oversampling to sound clean. At 2× the filter's aliasing already sits at the measurement floor, about 30 dB below the 1× figure. In 0.3.1 it took 8× to get close to that, because most of the aliasing came from the jump.

Web builds

Both browser synths are rebuilt with the fix:

Your saved browser presets carry over.

Downloads

macOS builds are universal (Apple Silicon + Intel); Windows is x64. Both formats are the same engine. Take CLAP if your DAW supports it.

macOS quarantines any plugin downloaded through a browser. If a plugin doesn't appear after a rescan:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/CLAP/vxn1b.clap
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/VXN1b.vst3
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/CLAP/VXN2.clap
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/VXN2.vst3
Assets 10
Loading