CamSR and ArkeCode have released Float Crush, a new type of bitcrusher exploiting the nature of the floating point unit. It offers something the regular bitcrusher can’t; a dual flavor distortion.
What does Float Crush do?
A floating point unit has three important segments to it, the sign, the exponent, and the mantissa. A normal 32-bit float uses 23 bits for it’s mantissa values and 7 bits for it’s exponent.
What Float Crush does is applies quantization to the exponent and mantissa range of bits, the same quantization a normal bitcrusher would. But the difference is this creates a multi-staged effect, where quantizing the mantissa range brings a soft, airy texture, and the exponent range which can completely ‘rearrange’ the sound.
There’s only a few presets but try it out for yourself. When adjusting the exponent effect, you might notice the signal gets softer, if that happens use the Pre-Gain control to compensate.
Download the plug-in (.dll file, 100kb) below.
Float Crush (Download size: 100.00 kB)
