MIDI out. In a DAW the plugin sends what it plays: every note of every part at the moment it sounds, a channel
per part as in the MIDI file of an export, the muted parts left out; a stop or a jump of the transport sends all notes
off. Record a part as notes, or let another instrument double it.
Outputs of their own. Besides the main output, a stereo output for each of its 23 stems (the kick, the sub, the bass, the 303, the hats, the percussion, the lead, the counter, the pluck, the arp, the pad, the stab, the piano, the strings, the choir, the brass, the timpani, the room, the plate, the hall, the cloud, the effects and the DJ effects), off until the
DAW switches them on; each carries its part before the master while the main output plays on.
Ableton Link in the standalone (Settings > Ableton Link, off to begin with): with other Link apps in the session
Parhelion takes their tempo, lines its bars up with theirs and starts and stops with them; alone it offers its own tempo.
The keyboard's options, each off until chosen (the Keyboard group): Lower Keys Play and Split At divide the keys
between two voices, Scale Lock keeps every key in the track's key, Velocity Curve (As Played, Soft, Hard, Fixed) shapes the
touch. A release always ends the note its press started.
On a Mac. Every release gets a build for Apple Silicon (macOS 12 or newer) -- the standalone and the VST3 --,
built and tested on GitHub's runners by the workflow macos and attached to the release as Parhelion-<version>-macOS.zip.
It is signed ad hoc, not notarized (that takes a paid Apple account; README-macOS.txt in the zip says how to open it),
and it has not yet been played on a real Mac.
Demos. The release "demos" holds a track per style as an MP3 and one of them as a video with pictures by
KaleidoscopeEnhanced, its cuts placed by the track's own
score cues; Tools/demo/make_demos.py renders them all again.
Behind the panel. A sound check (Tools/soundcheck.py, ctest -L sound): five styles, a track each, and their stems, measured by loudness
(BS.1770) against Tests/golden/soundcheck.json, so a change that makes a style louder, quieter or emptier shows up
before anybody listens. A CI run on every push (GitHub Actions: the build and the tests on Windows, the documentation
check on Linux) that nobody waits for. One release script for the family (Deploy/publish_release.ps1: the notes from
this file, the checksums, the tag, the release).
Downloads
- Parhelion-1.2.0-Setup.exe -- installs the standalone, the VST3, the renderer and the manual; the runtime is linked in.
- Parhelion-1.2.0-portable.zip -- the same in one archive, nothing to install.
- ParhelionQuest-1.2.0.apk -- the native Meta Quest app (
adb install -r ParhelionQuest-1.2.0.apk, developer mode). - Parhelion-Manual.pdf -- every page of the panel as a picture, every parameter.
- SHA256SUMS.txt -- the checksums of all of them.
Requirements: Windows 10 or 11 (x64) with AVX2 (every x86-64 since 2013), a VST3 host for the plugin, Meta Quest 2 or
later for the app. The installer is not code-signed: Windows' SmartScreen may warn once ("More info", "Run anyway").
Licence: AGPL-3.0.
The macOS zip (Apple Silicon) is built on GitHub's runners and attached here by the workflow macos within
the hour; it is signed ad hoc, not notarized, and not yet tried on a real Mac.
Linux (added the same evening): Parhelion-1.2.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz -- the standalone, the VST3 and the renderer for x86-64 (glibc 2.35 or newer: Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 and later), built and tested on GitHub's Ubuntu runners and tried under WSL; README-Linux.txt inside says where everything goes.