Release HeadMania-UpSampler-v1.17.4 · danghe/HeadManiaReleases

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Headline — a new flagship preset: Mega Organik Adaptive

The Organik family has always traded one thing for another: zero pre-ringing at all times (so transients never get smeared before they arrive), in exchange for a longer post-ring tail after each transient. That trade was the price of minimum-phase reconstruction. v1.17.4 stops asking you to pay it.

Mega Organik Adaptive (shown in the UI as Mega Organik V4 Halfband) sits at the top of the Organik group. On sustained material — vocals, sustained strings, ambience, room tone — it delivers the same Mega-tier reconstruction quality the Mega Organik presets are known for. On transients — a snare hit, a plucked guitar, a brass attack — it shortens its own response, on the fly, so the tail after each strike collapses almost to silence within a couple of milliseconds.

Think of it as a filter that knows when the music is breathing and when it's being struck, and adjusts its tail length to match.

What this looks like in measurement

Pre-ringing: zero, at all times. This is structural — same as every other Organik preset.
Post-ringing on sustained passages: identical long, smooth decay as Mega Organik.
Post-ringing on transients: the tail drops from roughly −33 dB at +2 ms after the attack to roughly −293 dB at +5 ms after the attack. That last number is at the floating-point noise floor — for practical purposes the tail is gone within a few milliseconds of the strike. Compared with a fixed Mega filter handling the same transient, the tail decays roughly nine orders of magnitude faster.

A reference decay-envelope plot (Mega Organik vs Mega Kinetic vs the two operating modes of the new preset) is included with this release at docs/measurements/v1.17.4_win_mega_postring_db_decay.png if you want to see the shapes side by side.

Honest caveats

Latency is 8 ms. This is not a preset for video or game lip-sync. Use one of the lower-latency presets for those.
The transition between sustained-mode and transient-mode is automatic and inaudible on the source material we've tested, but Mega Organik Adaptive remains 🔬 R&D — blind ABX validation is still pending.
The CPU cost is in the Mega tier — comparable to other Mega Organik presets. Older machines should stay on the non-Mega Organik options.

Other changes since v1.16.1

macOS — no more dropouts under load. Some listeners hit short audio dropouts on macOS when the system was busy with something else (background indexing, large file scans, heavy multitasking). v1.17.4 fixes that. The audio worker thread now runs at the correct macOS priority class, and the buffer cushion is wider when the highest-tier filters are active. On a busy Mac, playback now holds.

Kinetic V3 measures cleaner. An audio-thread scheduling fix that went in for the macOS work above also benefits the Kinetic V3 presets on Windows: null-test residuals come out roughly 4 dB lower than in v1.16.1. Nothing about the V3 design changed — the filters just run on a quieter thread now.

Cleaner UI. Through the v1.16.x and v1.17.x cycle, a number of research-grade diagnostics and engineer-facing readouts were moved out of the main surface. The shipping app is simpler to read and less cluttered. The advanced material is still reachable for anyone who wants it.

How to try Mega Organik Adaptive

Open the filter-preset list and scroll to the Mega family. The preset is labelled Mega Organik V4 Halfband 🔬 R&D.

Recommended A/B method: pick a track with a clear mix of sustained tonal content (a vocal line, a sustained string pad) and percussive transients (kick, snare, plucked strings). Compare against Mega Organik at the same volume. Sustained passages should sound the same. Transients should feel a touch tighter and more defined, without any change in tonal balance or apparent loudness. If you hear a brightness shift or a level change, something is wrong — please report it.