NAMp-rations

NAMp 0.4.0

Two pedal fixes. Nothing else in the amp changed since 0.3.0.

Chorus - Rate no longer moves the pitch

Delay modulation shifts pitch by the derivative of the delay, and the excursion had no
dependence on rate at all. At Depth 50 % the Rate knob reached ±56 cents a quarter of the way
round and ±205 cents at the end, against ±17 cents at its default — so most of the knob was
unusable as a chorus. Excursion is now bounded by rate as well as depth. Worst-case detune
across twelve Rate × Depth combinations measures 35.1 cents against a 35 cent ceiling.

Reverb - Mix no longer removes the guitar

Mix was a crossfade between dry and wet, and the knob was reported as doing almost nothing
until halfway and then changing drastically. That is exactly what it did: the tail grows 18 dB
over the whole knob but twelve of those are spent in the first quarter, so past halfway the
control had nearly stopped adding reverb and was mostly taking the dry signal away.

The dry path is a wire now and Mix scales the wet onto it. At Mix 0 the dry passes sample for
sample, measured at unity, error 0, at every setting.

Both fixes are in the amp's own built-in pedalboard and in the five pedal bundles that ship
beside the rack.

Downloads

One download per platform, holding everything: the plug-in, the standalone and the pedals.

Windows	NAMp-0.4.0-windows-x86_64.zip run NAMp-install.exe, or copy the .vst3 folders by hand if SmartScreen refuses it.
Linux	NAMp-0.4.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz extract and run install.sh. Needs glibc 2.36 or newer.
macOS	universal VST3 bundle, plug-in only. (Experimental)

namp-rack.exe on Windows is built with ASIO support and is therefore the one binary here
conveyed under GPLv3; everything else in every archive is MIT. Its Complete Corresponding
Source is published beside it as namp-rack-0.4.0-corresponding-source.tar.gz, and
LICENSE-windows-asio.txt in the archive explains the split.

The amp ships no captures. Each of the four channels is a folder or a file you point it at.

ASIO is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH, registered in Europe and other countries.
VST is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.

NAMp-rations

NAMp Rack is new in this release: the same four-channel amp, in its own
window, with no DAW involved. Plug in and play. It also hosts your own
plug-ins before and after the amp, so the pedalboard is whatever you already
own.

• Linux JACK, hosts VST3 and LV2
• Windows ASIO first, WASAPI if you have no ASIO driver; hosts VST3

The five Rations pedals ship as separate plug-ins too, so the Rack and
your DAW can load them like any other.

One download per platform

NAMp-0.3.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz	./install.sh
NAMp-0.3.0-windows-x86_64.zip	NAMp-install.exe tick what you want
NAMp-rations-0.3.0-macos-universal.zip	Still expriemental, no standalone
The plug-in (VST3 + LV2) is the same amp as the standalone, from the same
source.

Still no captures. Four empty channels is the normal starting state — load
your own.

One licence note

namp-rack.exe on Windows is GPLv3, not MIT, because it has the ASIO SDK
compiled in. Everything else, the plug-in, the pedals, all of Linux, and every
line of source stays MIT. LICENSE-windows-asio.txt in the archive explains
it in a page.

namp-rack-0.3.0-corresponding-source.tar.gz is the complete source for that
one binary, this repo, its five pinned dependencies, the ASIO SDK files and the
five statically linked libraries, with a SHA-256 for every file. GitHub's
"Source code" archives below do not include the submodules or the bundled
libraries, so they are not a substitute for it.

NAMp-rations

NAMp Rations v0.2.0

A four-channel Neural Amp Modeler amp head, as a raw VST3 — no JUCE, no frameworks.
Linux and Windows, plus an experimental macOS build.

Fixed: input calibration never worked

Calibrate Input was greyed out and ignored your clicks

The plug-in was looking for that value in the wrong place inside the .nam file. The
trainer writes it once per file, because it describes the rig the amp was captured
through; we were reading it per size-variant, where it never appears. So every capture
looked like it had no level, and the whole calibration block stayed dead.

Loudness was stored per-variant and was read correctly, which is why Normalized always
worked and only calibration was broken.

If you have captures that state their input level, that toggle now lights up and does
what it says. If yours don't, nothing changes — the option stays greyed, correctly.

Also in the calibration panel

• The dBu level field is always editable. It used to grey out along with the toggle,
  which meant that with a channel selected whose captures state no level, you could not
  type in your interface's level at all — even though it is the number your other
  channels get measured against. It is a fact about your audio interface, not about any
  one bank, so it no longer depends on which channel is sounding.
• The greying explains itself. An output mode or calibration is offered only when
  every capture in a bank carries the metadata, because otherwise the sound would jump
  in level as the dial swept past the odd one out. The panel now says so — options read
  [not in every capture], and a footnote explains that one file is enough to grey the
  whole channel. Previously a single stray capture in a folder of ten greyed everything
  with no explanation at all.

Fixed

• A crash and a memory-safety bug when loading saved projects, in the code that reads
  strings out of a project file.
• A single bad (non-finite) input sample could leave the Boost, Flanger or Reverb
  outputting silence-or-noise for the rest of the session, recoverable only by stomping
  the pedal off and on. It is now cleared at the pedal's input.

macOS is experimental, read this before downloading

Nobody working on this has a Mac. Linux and Windows are built and proved on one Linux
machine; the macOS build is made by GitHub's runners and has never been played by anyone
who could fix it.

What is checked on both Mac architectures: it builds, loads, passes Steinberg's validator,
exports exactly the right entry points, links nothing outside the system, and draws all
four editor pages identically on Apple Silicon and Intel. How it sounds is unmeasured —
the tests that assert exact figures need capture files, and captures belong to the people
who made them, so they cannot run on a hosted build machine. There is no macOS standalone.

Installing

See the README for per-platform instructions. In short: Linux gets a tarball with an
install.sh and the standalone; Windows gets an installer and a plain zip if you would
rather copy the bundle yourself; macOS gets a zip you must clear the quarantine flag on.

You supply your own captures. Nothing ships in the bundle.

Licence

MIT.

NAMp-rations

A four-channel amp head built on Neural Amp Modeler
captures — a raw VST3 plug-in (no JUCE, no iPlug2, no VSTGUI) for Windows and Linux, plus a
JACK standalone on Linux. There is also an experimental macOS build — read
that section before you download it.

A .nam capture freezes an amp at one knob position on one channel. This gives you four channels,
each loading its own bank of captures, with its dial sweeping that whole bank continuously — so a
channel captured at ascending gain settings gives you that amp's gain control back. Exactly one
channel sounds at a time, and the change is instant and silent, by bat switch or MIDI footswitch.

Around them: Threshold, Bass, Middle and Treble, per-channel trims, a cabinet page for one or two
impulse responses with a measured blend, and a board of five pedals — Boost and Chorus before the
amp, Flanger, Delay and Reverb after it.

No captures are included. It plays yours, four banks of them. A fresh instance comes up with
four empty channels — click Captures, MIDI, Settings, top right, and point each loader at a
folder of .nam files or at a single one. The folder's name becomes the channel's name.

Which file

Platform	Download
Windows (64-bit)	NAMp-rations-0.1.0-windows-x86_64.zip
Linux (x86-64)	NAMp-rations-0.1.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
macOS — experimental, read below	NAMp-rations-0.1.0-macos-universal.zip

Windows

The ZIP holds NAMp-rations-install.exe and the same NAMp-rations.vst3 bundle loose beside it, so
you can install either way — but make sure you only end up with one copy, or your host will list
it twice. The installer offers to remove the other one if it finds it.

Nothing else to install: cairo, FreeType, libpng, zlib and the GCC runtime are all linked into the
plug-in. The installer is not code-signed, so SmartScreen will warn you; hand-copying the folder
is a first-class option for exactly that reason.

Linux

The tarball holds the plug-in and namp-rations-standalone, which are the same amp twice — the
standalone hosts the bundle rather than duplicating it, so keep the two together.

tar xf NAMp-rations-0.1.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
cd NAMp-rations-0.1.0/
./install.sh

Everything lands under your home directory and nothing needs root: the plug-in in ~/.vst3, the
standalone in ~/.local/bin, plus a menu entry and icons. ./install.sh --uninstall removes all of
it. cairo, FreeType and fontconfig come from your system; the standalone also wants a JACK server
(jackd, or a PipeWire desktop). It registers NAMp-rations:in, :out_l, :out_r and :midi_in —
the audio ports are auto-connected, the MIDI one deliberately is not.

macOS — experimental

Read this before downloading. It is offered as an experiment, and the honest summary is that it
may not work:

• Nobody working on this has a Mac. Windows and Linux are both built and proved on one Linux
  machine — Windows works because Wine runs every check there. macOS has no equivalent, so it is
  built by GitHub's macOS runners and has never been played by anyone who could fix it.
• The sound is unmeasured on macOS. On the other two platforms a set of offline proofs asserts
  exact figures — the channel switch converging on a continuously-running reference to within 1e-6,
  the output modes to three decimal places. Those proofs need capture files, captures are their
  authors' work rather than mine, and so they cannot run on a hosted build machine. What is
  checked on both Mac architectures: it builds, loads, passes Steinberg's own validator, exports
  exactly the three entry points a host calls, links nothing outside the system, and renders all
  four editor pages — with the Apple Silicon and Intel renders compared against each other pixel for
  pixel. That is a floor, not a guarantee.
• There is no standalone. The macOS release is the plug-in only.

One file carries both Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later. Nothing else to
install — cairo, FreeType, libpng, pixman and zlib are built in.

Installing needs Terminal once, for about thirty seconds, and you do not have to type any file
names. It cannot be done entirely in Finder because the plug-in is not notarized by Apple (that
needs a paid developer account); macOS marks anything downloaded as quarantined and refuses to load
quarantined code Apple has not signed off, so that flag has to be cleared. install.sh does it.

1. Double-click the .zip you downloaded. A folder appears beside it.
2. Open Terminal: hold Command and press the space bar, type terminal, press Return.
3. In that window type the four letters bash and then one space. Do not press Return yet.
4. Drag the file install.sh out of the folder and drop it onto the Terminal window — its
   location appears after what you typed, so there is nothing to spell.
5. Press Return.

It prints Installed: and a location. Rescan plug-ins in your DAW and it is there. The plug-in goes
to ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3; nothing needs an administrator password and nothing is put
outside your home folder. To remove it, repeat those steps and type one space and --uninstall
before pressing Return.

If you would rather copy it by hand: drag NAMp-rations.vst3 into ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3,
then run xattr -cr ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/NAMp-rations.vst3 in Terminal once. That step is
not optional — without it your DAW finds the plug-in, fails to load it, and usually does not say why.

Notes and known limitations

• Captures must be feed-forward (WaveNet or ConvNet). An LSTM capture is refused rather than
  silently accepted: the click-free sweep rests on the model's output being a function of a bounded
  input window, and an LSTM's cell state has unbounded memory.
• Buffer size. The channel switch is qualified at 128 frames, and 256 is tested good on
  Linux in both Reaper and the standalone — no pops, no xruns. What does not fit is the
  pedalboard alongside the switch at 128: the switch alone uses about two thirds of a 2.67 ms
  period against a usable deadline of roughly three quarters, and any configuration of the board
  lands inside that headroom. If you run a busy board, use 256. Those figures are Linux and x86-64;
  nothing equivalent has been measured on a Mac, in either direction.
• MIDI learn. A learned CC or Program Change answers on any MIDI channel — both reach a VST3
  plug-in as parameter changes, and the channel is already gone by then. Only a learned Note On can
  be pinned to a channel. The four channel rows set; the five pedal rows toggle.
• Windows is cross-built from Linux and tested under Wine — SDK validator clean, the
  editor's four pages rendering pixel-for-pixel against the Linux build. A real Windows machine has
  not signed it off, so Windows reports are especially welcome.
• macOS is built on GitHub Actions and its DSP is unproven — see above. Bug reports from a Mac
  are worth more than from anywhere else right now, because nothing here can find those faults.
• The plug-in is MIT; see NOTICE in the archive for every dependency and its licence. No GPLv3
  and no JUCE anywhere in the include graph.

Feedback wanted on: hosts other than Reaper, real Windows, any Mac at all, and footswitches
— which model you have and whether it sends CC, Program Change or notes.