Sonic Charge has announced the release of Permut8, an effect plug-in for Windows and Mac that can modulate, manipulate and mangle your audio in countless ways through the combination of some basic but unique building blocks.
The Permut8 user-interface might seem a bit intimidating at first. Make no mistake, this is complex machinery at work, but it is also a product that is designed for experimentation and happy accidents.
Permut8 is an effect plug-in that embraces the sounds of primitive digital signal processing hardware. It is programmable to produce a wide range of effects from traditional delays and flangers to beat-repeaters, bit-crushers and yet unheard of circuit bent madness. At its core is a 12-bit digital delay with variable sample rate from 0 to 352 khz. The delay is controlled by a programmable processor with an assortment of operators, allowing you to create almost any type of effect you can imagine and many more that you can’t. The input and output stages offers virtual analog components for saturation, limiting and filtering. The output can be fed back into the input to create echoes, comb-filter effects and never-ending chaos.
With Permut8 we have made a serious effort to make a plug-in that feels and sounds like a piece of physical digital hardware and not like your typical software effect. Permut8 can make aliasing noises that would make any Commodore 64 green of envy, but its aliasing is different from what you normally encounter in software DSP. For example, it is unrelated to the host sample rate and you can tune it exactly with the “clock frequency” knob. Furthermore, the components that should not alias, e.g. the “analog” saturation, employ heavy-duty anti-aliasing and oversampling techniques to avoid doing so. Permut8 has got just the right dose of hiss, hum, distortion and unpredictability to make it come alive without sacrificing fidelity when you don’t want to.
Introduction to Sonic Charge’s Permut8 effect unit.
Permut8 for Windows and Mac (VST/AU) is available to purchase for $66 USD (+ VAT if applicable).
Sonic Charge has announced it will be releasing its Permut8 effect plug-in this Monday.
Many of you have seen and solved the puzzle we put up earlier (524 to be precise) and you can listen to some examples on our home page right now. Now I think it is about time to do a little introduction.
Permut8 is an effect that can take on many forms. It is one of those products that is hard to describe in a couple of sentences. The kind that a marketing department would hate (luckily we have no marketing department at Sonic Charge). It excels in digital noises of all kinds, but can also sound warm and lush. It can do conventional delay effects and it can create circuit bent mayhem from hell. Perhaps more important than what it does is how it does it. Permut8 gives you a number of primitive operators that you combine in different ways to manipulate the playback position on a delay-line. This runs on an imaginary vintage digital processor with 12-bit A/D D/A conversion and variable clock frequency from 0 to 352kHz. On top of this you will find a number of “analog” components for filtering, limiting, saturation and more.
Did that sound complicated? Permut8 is complicated, but it is also a product that is designed for experimentation and happy accidents, and boy do they happen often. Bring your crash helmet.
Permut8 will be available for Windows and Mac (VST/AU) for $66 USD excl. VAT.
Carl Löfgren of Fingerpushers and Plughugger has released Freon Surfer FZ, a free instrument based on the Freon Surfer preset of the Sonic Charge MicroTonic software drum machine.
Freon Surfer FZ with custom Native Instruments Kontakt interface.
All eight drum sounds have been sampled by the mighty Casio FZ-20m sampler at 36 kilohertz, at crunchy 9 kilohertz and at 9 kilohertz too loud to capture the natural distortion of the analog converters.
Lastly, we did the old-school drum and bass trick of timestretching the samples back and forth a number of times, to give the samples a glitchy digital feel to them. For this we used our E-mu E4XT sampler.
Below are two short demo clips showcasing the various sound banks.
Freon Surfer FZ features
8 sounds recorded at 36kHz, 9kHz, 9kHz overdriven, and 9kHz stretched.
32 unique samples in total, 16-bit/44kHz mono Wav.
Instrument patches for Kontakt 4, Maschine, and Geist.
Custom Kontakt GUI with knob to select sound bank.
The Freon Surfer FZ sample pack is available as a free download.
Sonic Charge has announced that its Bitspeek real-time pitch-excited linear prediction codec effect is now available for Reason.
Rack Extensions for Reason was released today and we are proud to be able to offer Bitspeek in their store from day 1. The Rack Extension format has been in the making for a long time and has taken many sharp turns. From the very conception of Record, it has always been the intention to add plug-in support and as a consultant I’ve been involved in at least three entirely different solutions (and yes, one of them was to simply add VST and AU support). It has taken its time, but the final technology is amazingly well-designed and I have high hopes for the future of this format.
Resynthesize audio in Propllerhead’s Reason with the Bitspeek Rack Extension.
Compared to the AU/VST version, Bitspeek RE adds the following features:
Stereo analysis and resynthesis. The stereo image (pan and width) of the incoming audio is analyzed and resynthesized.
Improved volume tracking algorithm with much better transient response and consistency across source material and sample-rates.
External audio input allows you to use the formant filter on any material.
Lots of CV ins and outs for integrating into your rack and scoring high on geekness factor.
Comes with a selection of Combinators that demonstrates the possibilities with the extra inputs and outputs.
Bitspeek RE is available to purchase from the Rack Extension store for $49 USD / 39 EUR (incl. VAT).
Sonic Charge has announced it is now beta testing Permut8, a new effect plug-in for Windows and Mac.
In an attempt to make life a bit more exciting we are currently beta testing two new releases simultaneously. One is a VST/AU called Permut8. You can see and hear it on our home page if you manage to solve the puzzle first. We don’t give anything for free here at Sonic Charge, not even screenshots or demo tracks :P.
Couldn’t help myself ruining the screenshot puzzle, sorry! But what exactly is Permut8? Solve the puzzle at Sonic Charge’s website and have a listen at the sound demo for more clues.
Permut8 is expected to be released this summer. A beta version is available now (requires signup and impressive CV).
Sonic Charge is also working on Bitspeek RE, an adaptation of Bitspeek for Propellerheads new Rack Extension technology.
It adds some minor features compared to the VST/AU. For example it will analyse the stereo image of the source material and then reproduce it with the built-in synthesizer. What excites us the most about this port though, is the routing possibilities you get with Reason. Here is a video of an early prototype that shows a little bit of what you can do
Bitspeek RE will be ready when Reason 6.5 is launched this month.
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