ForTran 1.0.0.1

ForTran 1.0.0.1

A polyphonic additive/formant synthesiser for macOS, as a VST3 and an
Audio Unit. Originally a Cakewalk DXi written in 2003; this is the port.

Ten sine partials, each with its own level, phase, invert and ADSR; ten
formant envelopes over them; a sweepable filter with four switchable shapes
(low pass, high pass, comb, grass); amplitude and filter envelopes; vibrato,
tremolo and a per-harmonic LFO; sixteen voices.

Installing

Download ForTran-1.0.0.1.pkg and open it. The installer offers the two
formats separately:

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/ForTran.vst3
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/ForTran.component

Quit your DAW first — a running host holds the old copy open. Signed with a
Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so it installs without any
Privacy & Security detour.

Requires macOS 10.13 or later.

Two things that will look like bugs and are not

• The Level knob starts 20 dB down. The 2003 original ran hot enough to
  clip a dense chord. The top of that knob's travel is exactly the original's
  level, so nothing is lost — it is one turn away.
• The pitch wheel covers a whole octave either way, not two semitones.
  That is the DXi's own law, kept deliberately.

Known gaps

• Program change does not select the waveform. In the DXi the MIDI patch
  number chose sine, square or saw; this port is sine partials only.
• The output ladder's corner moves with the sample rate. Its coefficients
  are constants the original never scaled, so the same patch is more than an
  octave brighter at 96 kHz than at 44.1 kHz. Reproduced rather than fixed;
  the Ladder switch takes it out.

Everything deliberate about the port — every deviation from the original and
why — is in PORTING-NOTES.md.

Uninstalling

A .pkg never will, so:

sudo rm -rf /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/ForTran.vst3
sudo rm -rf /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/ForTran.component

Checksum

d7d4c5bd7e271d52cd85ad403efb21fbdc64933e602de8490dec2bf4ced65b9d  ForTran-1.0.0.1.pkg

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Copyright 2026 A. E. Cobley. CC BY-SA 4.0.
VST is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.