BlauKraut Engineering has announced the release of a public beta version of a major overhaul of its Charlatan free software synthesizer instrument.

After several years in the making, I’m pleased to announce the next major iteration of Charlatan, the free Virtual Analog synth!

Charlatan³ has been redesigned from the ground up in order to better meet the needs of today’s productions. Besides the new powerful synthesis engine, the completely revamped user interface offers an ultra-fast workflow and encourages a creative sound design process much like what the original synth is known for.

Charlatan³ features

  • 2 dual oscillators per voice with custom drawable waveforms, cross-modulation (Phase Mod, linear Frequency Mod, Ring Mod) and windowed hard sync.
  • 2 multi-mode filters per voice with 9 filter types each and flexible routing.
  • Oscillator unison with up to 7 unison voices per synth voice.
  • 4 modulation generators with user-definable shape where each can operate either as LFO or envelope generator.
  • 4 Modulation transformers (XFORM) allow reshaping any control signal through a user-defined mapping.
  • Arbitrary routing of modulation signals via Drag’n’Drop.
  • High-quality master FX section.
  • Very low CPU and RAM usage.
  • Optional internal 2x oversampling.
  • Preset browser.

Available in VST3 and CLAP plugin formats, the public beta is available for Windows 10 or later and Ubuntu Linux 20.04 x86_64 or compatible distribution.