Overtonium v1.2.0
Overtonium 1.2.0
A 32-partial additive synthesiser laid out like a 32-channel mixer. Every channel is one sine oscillator locked to a harmonic of the played note, and every channel has its own tuning, envelope and modulation.
What is new in 1.2.0
Every channel can have an output of its own. Alongside the stereo mix there are now 33 more outputs, one per partial and one for the noise channel, so a single patch can arrive in the host as 33 tracks to treat separately. They start switched off, so the plugin is an ordinary stereo instrument until a host asks for more. Each one is dry, taken after the envelope, tremolo, velocity, pressure and fader but before wobble, the echo, the reverb, the converter and the master gain, which is the whole reason to route a channel out: you want to treat it yourself rather than inherit a reverb tail somebody else chose. They do not sum to the mix, and are not meant to.
Use the VST3 for this. The Audio Unit declares the same 33 outputs, but Logic offers no multi-output option for it and loads it as a plain stereo instrument, which is being looked into. Logic reads VST3s, so nothing is out of reach on macOS, and the other formats are unaffected.
MPE slide goes somewhere useful. The third MPE dimension, the forward and back axis under a finger, arriving as CC74 on the note's own channel. Settings has a Slide to entry with three answers: off, brightness, or tuning.
One LINK curve where there were two tilts. Tilt up and tilt down were pinned to the ends of the series, so the only way to get a slope across the mixer was to grab an end and accept the direction that came with it. Taper from the grab weights each channel by how far it sits from the one you are dragging. Grab channel 1 and the mixer tilts down across its full width, grab channel 32 and it tilts up, and grab channel 10 and the curve peaks under your hand and falls away on both sides, which is a shape the two fixed tilts could not make.
The level readout counts all the way down. It used to give up at -66 dB and say -inf for everything below, which was two thirds of the fader's usable bottom end. It now reads down to -99.9 dB. The fader is spaced by decibels to match, so the quiet end has room: -66 dB sat five pixels off the bottom and now sits at forty-four.
Every control has a name a screen reader can read. All 635 of them, each one distinct.
Settings is grouped. MPE, the aftertouch source and the slide destination sit together under Expression, since all three say how something your controller sends should reach the sound. Zoom is last and on its own, because how big the window is on your screen is not a property of the instrument.
The cents readout drops its plus sign. Seven bars cannot draw a plus that reads as anything but a speck beside the minus, so a partial sharp of equal temperament now carries no sign at all, the way a tuner writes it.
Fixed
A crash with the new outputs enabled. A host may hand the plugin fewer channels than the layout it agreed to, and with the per-channel outputs switched on the plugin wrote past the end of that buffer. Found by pluginval, fixed, and now covered by a test.
Upgrading from 1.1.0
Patches and presets load unchanged and sound identical. Stored levels are gains and mean exactly what they did before.
Two things to know. Automation written against the old level fader will play back at different levels, because the fader's travel is spaced by decibels now rather than by gain. And a session saved with tilt up or tilt down selected opens on taper, which is the curve that replaced them.
Hosts may want to rescan, since the plugin now offers more outputs than it did.
Installing
The install page has a row per file saying who each one is for. In short: take the installer for your platform, or the zip beside it if you have no administrator rights or keep plugins somewhere of your own.
| Platform | Installer | Formats |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | .pkg, with a chooser |
VST3, Audio Unit, Standalone |
| Windows | .exe |
VST3, Standalone |
| Linux | none, use the zip | VST3, LV2, Standalone |
The macOS build is a universal binary and runs on both Apple Silicon and Intel. Logic and GarageBand only look for new Audio Units when they start, so restart them after installing.
On Linux the zip's contents go in ~/.vst3 and ~/.lv2.
What has actually been tried
All three platforms are built on every push, run through both test suites, and put through pluginval at strictness 8. The VST3 also goes through Steinberg's own conformance validator, which covers the bus arrangements the new outputs introduce. macOS is the only platform where the plugin has been loaded into a real host, where the Audio Unit and the VST3 also pass auval. Nobody has run the Windows or Linux builds in a DAW yet, so treat those as untried and please open an issue with whatever you find.
The 33 outputs in particular have been through the validators but through only one host, so reports of how they appear in yours are welcome, whichever format you use.
Windows will warn you
The Windows installer is not signed, so SmartScreen says the publisher is unknown. Choose "More info" and then "Run anyway". If you would rather not, build from source: the readme says how, and it takes one CMake command.
macOS
The installer is signed and notarised, so it opens without a warning. It asks which of the three formats you want and installs only those.
Licence
AGPLv3, which follows from JUCE. The whole source is in this repository.