Overtonium v1.4.0
Overtonium 1.4.0
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 1.4.0
Three more factory presets, nineteen in all. 2-bit Fuzz Organ is an organ at 8 kHz and 2 bits, where the aliasing and the quantisation noise are the distortion rather than an effect laid over the top, and its aftertouch blends the root note towards a fifth. Metallic Piano is a thin, metallic upright. Omni-84 is the SonicStrings Voice 2 from a Suzuki Omnichord OM-84 System Two. They sit in alphabetical place among the others, which moves the ones after them.
Legato. A new entry at the head of the polyphony list, above one voice, and the one setting where the instrument is not polyphonic at all. Pressing a key while another is still held moves the note rather than starting it again, so the envelopes carry on and a run keeps the shape the first key gave it instead of restarting the attack under your fingers. Letting a key go while others are down falls back to the most recent of them, which is what makes a trill work, and only the last key coming up releases the note.
One voice per key is a switch now. Striking a key that is already sounding takes over the voice it is using, which is what an acoustic instrument does and what stops a tapped key with a long release piling every tap on the last. Piling up is also a sound, though: a bell struck over and over builds up. The switch sits in Settings under the voice counts, since it answers the other half of the same question. It is on by default, which is how the instrument already behaved, and it belongs to the session rather than to a patch, so no preset moves it.
Clearing every mute or solo at once. A solo left on somewhere down thirty-three strips is easy to lose and tedious to find, since the buttons are four pixels apart and there are sixty-six of them. Right-clicking an M or an S offers to clear either switch across the mixer, and says how many there are to clear before you do.
Every factory preset is described, both on the presets page and in the source beside the patch itself.
Fixed
A right-click on a mute or solo button opened two menus. The LINK menu came up first and the button's own menu waited behind it. Only the button's menu opens now, and a right-click anywhere else in the mixer still reaches LINK.
The channel highlight could be left lit. Opening a menu over a channel and dismissing it somewhere else left the first channel lit, and hovering it again was the only way to clear it. A menu takes the mouse away without the strip being told the pointer left, so the strip now lets the hover go when the right-click arrives.
The first polyphony entry said "1 voices".
Upgrading from 1.3.0
Patches and presets load unchanged and sound identical.
Two things to know, both from lists that gained an entry at the top. Polyphony indices have shifted by one, so a session saved with 8 voices opens on 6 and wants setting again. And the factory presets are renumbered, since the three new ones sort into place rather than onto the end: a session that stored a preset by number opens on a different one. The sound is stored with the session either way, so nothing changes underneath you, but the name shown may not be the one you saved.
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.
If you installed an earlier version with the package, the installer replaces it. A plugin folder holding two copies of Overtonium is worth tidying: macOS registers one of them and the host uses whichever that is, which need not be the newer.
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. 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.
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.