FE Chladni

Added

• The standalone app has its own icon.
• If Windows is missing something the plugin needs, it now tells you what to install.

Fixed

• The interface opens on every computer, in every DAW and in the standalone app, on all supported versions of Windows.

Fixed

• Your saved interface settings are applied correctly every time a plugin window opens.

Changed

• Small refinements to the interface.

Changed

• The plugin opens a little taller, so the Plate, Motion and Output panels are all in view from the moment it does.

Changed

• Interface refinements.

• FE Chladni sends your audio through a real vibrating plate and shows you the sand figure it makes.

Added

• Four plate materials — steel, aluminium, brass and glass — each with its own ring and character, and each with the colour of the metal it is. Switch to brass and you are looking at brass.
• Three plate shapes: a disc, a square, and a stretchable rectangle, each with a distinct set of tones.
• Size and Thickness set the plate's pitch the way they would on the real object: a smaller or thicker plate rings higher.
• Damping takes the plate from a short percussive body to a ring lasting tens of seconds.
• Contact sets how finely your signal touches the plate, from a needle point to a soft, broad fingertip — the plugin's tone control. It sweeps from bright and complete to a dark, heavy thud across its whole travel, and it behaves the same way on a small plate as on a large one. The exciter on the plate is drawn at the real size of the patch, so it grows and shrinks with the control and you can see the setting as well as hear it.
• A drive point you can drag anywhere on the plate, or automate. Moving it changes which of the plate's tones can sound at all, which is a very different result from filtering the ones that already do.
• Sync to DAW locks the exciter's path to your project's tempo. Rate then reads musical values instead of Hz — eight bars a lap down to a sixteenth-note triplet — and follows the tempo wherever it goes. Bar lengths respect your time signature, so a one-bar lap really is one bar in 3/4.
• Stereo width taken from two listening points on the plate itself, so the image comes from the plate genuinely moving differently in two places.
• A live sand figure showing the plate's still lines as it sounds. The sand heaps up along them into ridges you can see, and stays on the plate however long you leave it running.
• Fourteen factory presets, from a bell and a gong to a snare body and a dark slab, plus one for each way of moving the exciter. Each one is a plate you could have built yourself, so they are as much a starting point as a sound.
• A dice that builds a whole new plate in one click — a bell, a gong, a snare body, a shimmer, a slab, glass, or one with the exciter already travelling. It picks a character and then builds a plate around it, so every roll is a plate you can actually hear, pitched somewhere you can use it.
• MIDI Learn on every control. Right-click a knob, move something on your controller, and the two are linked. Mappings are saved with your project and keep working with the plugin's window closed.
• Six interface looks to choose from, including a light one for a bright room. Your choice is remembered across projects.
• Free, with a FreqElement account.