Your expression. Rendered live.

DRIFT in the window is now the plugin, lane for lane. Five lanes you point at Pitch, Pressure or any continuous CC, each with its own shape and phase relationship, free in Hz or locked to the transport, plus strum, ratchet, scale drift and 24 factory presets. The PB / Mod tile learns a third style, the Expression Pad, a stack of tilting rings played with the mouse that sends real channel pressure and CC74 to every sounding note. The Microtonal design plays a tuning of your own: just intonation, any number of equal steps, or a Scala .scl file you load, and the tuning leaves the app, so your synth follows. The Grand Staff lets you choose how it writes: note labels as names, degrees or sol-fa, chord labels as symbols, Roman numerals or figured bass, round noteheads or the seven shape notes, and a guitar or ukulele fingering above the chord. The Stream Log gains a fifth view, Tracker, and a loaded .mid file brings its time signature, key signature and lyrics with it.

• DRIFT in the window is the plugin: the tile carries the plugin window’s order, a trail memory on every channel, ghost lines for a pedal or wheel with no sounding voice, a scope timeline per note, and 24 factory presets in five groups: Keys, Pads, Chords, Arp and FX
• Strum, ratchet and scale drift in the engine: a chord keeps its build while it drifts, every lane has its own start point and phase, and the sync divisions reach from 16/4 down to 1/64
• The Expression Pad, the PB / Mod tile’s third style: tilting rings under the mouse that send real channel pressure and CC74 to every sounding note, with the zone value as a floor under them
• A tuning of your own: just intonation, any number of equal steps from 2 to 96, or a Scala .scl file you load, with a gauge on every key reading its offset in cents. The tuning leaves the app, so your synth follows
• The Grand Staff writes it your way: names, degrees or sol-fa on the notes, symbols, Roman numerals or figured bass on the chords, round noteheads or the seven shape notes, and a guitar or ukulele fingering drawn above the chord
• Tracker, the Stream Log’s fifth view, and a loaded .mid file brings its time signature, key signature and lyrics with it
• One clock for bars and notation: bar lines in live play, one zero point and one bar length shared by the clock, the sheet and the recorder
• A new look: the app starts black and gray like its Drift sibling, and the measured logo green is the second signal color, the one that says this is on
• Faster first start: the depth estimator loads with its first real use instead of at boot
• And the fine print: a device bend on channel 1 is the zone wheel and is drawn as its two semitones everywhere, the mouse strike takes its velocity from the pressure lever, a continuous pedal’s sensor flutter is not read as a gesture, and Panic also clears the microtonal detune

AURA gains three new styles, and Tunnel was rebuilt from the ground up. Smoke breathes a fine ribbon out of every note’s pitch column on a real fluid simulation rather than particles, and every held key turns its own vortex: press harder and it spins faster, open the timbre and it grows wider, let go and the room collapses back the way it was pushed out. Shatter is a sheet of glass with a memory, where every note is a knock, every knock opens one more stage of the break, and the cracks never heal. Black Hole hangs two discs of orbiting streams around a pure black horizon and lets a bend bow the inner streams around the body. And Tunnel is new work under an old name: a flight through a tiled tube of light with no end in sight, curving away mid frame and leaving through the edge. Away from AURA, the bend wheel finally moves everything, the app can leave its own frame, and DRIFT was rebuilt around five lanes.

• Smoke: a real fluid simulation instead of particles. A hard strike blows a circle clear like a stone hitting water, and letting go pulls that displaced smoke visibly back in, exactly where your velocity sent it
• Shatter: glass with a damage history. Lean on a held key and it gives way in strobe-like jerks, bend a held note and the damage marches sideways across the pane, and only when a knock can find no glass left does the whole sheet go in a white blink
• Black Hole: two discs of silky orbiting streams around a pure black horizon, crossing along one seam where they trade colors, with the pose set by what you play
• Tunnel, rebuilt from the ground up: pressure is thrust, a full bend lays the exit out on the horizon left or right, and every strike sends a wave of light down the wall towards you. AURA now holds 27 styles, two presets each
• The bend wheel moves the whole picture: your notes live on member channels while the wheel sends on the master channel, and the visuals now sum the two the way your synth does. A held chord travels as one while a finger glide beside it still bends only its own note, in semitones rather than wheel positions
• Stage View: one shortcut clears toolbar, frames and titles, fills the screen with your layout and fades the cursor away. Everything keeps playing, and Esc brings the workspace back exactly as it was
• DRIFT rebuilt around five lanes instead of four fixed ones: point any lane at Pitch, Pressure or any continuous CC, pick how its voices relate (CHAOS, PARALLEL, ORBIT, SPLIT), and take its rate from the host tempo instead of Hz. The arp got real shuffle, and every readout now names what actually leaves the port rather than where the knob sits
• Point Cloud grew hands: turn, tip and lean the cloud to any pose and it holds, while Speed keeps a named motion running. The dolly reaches back to -200%, and a source that does not match your panel’s shape is no longer clipped at the picture’s own edge
• Color key and Hue key on every FORGE effect, not just as a global switch, so one effect can chase brightness while its neighbor holds a place on the picture
• CASCADE’s Step color driver moves every note one slot along a palette, and repainting the palette recolors the notes already on screen
• Hold Shift while dragging any slider and the value moves one step at a time, with the centre detents out of the way
• A consistency pass over every settings panel: each module picks its view the same way, menus line up on one column app-wide, and controls that do not apply right now gray out instead of vanishing

FORGE has always turned a picture into a scene you fly through. In 2.6 the picture itself comes apart. Point Cloud rebuilds it as a grid of points and pushes each one into real depth by the depth map, so the Virtual Camera flies between them instead of across a flat plane. And the cloud plays: strike a note and the points inside its disc come at you, pressure holds them out, slide opens the cone wider, pitch bend moves it sideways. Choose hard Dots, soft Splats, or Glyphs that stamp a character per point from a set you type in yourself, so the image comes back written in your own letters. Spin turns the whole cloud on a free axis, winding up while you play and settling back upright in silence. Cells takes the other road and leaves the frame whole, redrawing it cell by cell as ASCII, halftone or dither over any source. Both need WebGL2. And once you are done flying, 2.6 removes the last thing you needed in order to play at all: Typing Keys puts two manuals under your hands on the computer keyboard, so a laptop on a train is enough.

• FORGE Point Cloud: the picture rebuilt as a cloud of points with real depth, to fly through and to play. Hard Dots, soft Splats, or Glyphs that stamp a character per point, from a character set you type in yourself. WebGL2 required
• Point Cloud Spin: the whole cloud turns on a free axis, with Speed, Axis and Lean, winding up while you play and settling back upright in silence
• FORGE Cells: the finished frame broken into a grid and drawn cell by cell, as ASCII, Halftone or Dither, over any source. WebGL2 required
• CASCADE impacts combine: ten independent layers at the key line instead of one choice, so a shower of sparks can sit inside a fountain. An Own color switch gives every armed layer one shared colour, and note ribbons gain a Chrome finish next to Diamond and Glass
• Typing Keys: two manuals under your hands, eight white keys each, Q W E R T Y U I over Z X C V B N M , with the sharps on the row above each. Those are key positions, not letters: a QWERTZ or AZERTY board plays the same shapes under the same fingers, and the Keyboard module labels every key with the caps you actually have
• Space is the sustain pedal, Shift accents a note, and the octave moves with the arrow keys or the numpad plus and minus, far enough that every key of your chosen keyboard size can be reached
• DRIFT makes it expressive: one click turns every typed note into a full MPE voice with its own pressure, bend and CC74
• A new Play pill holds both ways to play without a controller, typing and Mouse Mode, and MIDI Out is left to ports and routing
• Expression Overview gains a fifth mode, Rack: every source drawn as the piece of studio gear you would read it on, and every row lets you pick Auto, Knob, Meter or Bar
• MIDI Learn now reaches the FORGE Conductor: three more learn slots, Enable, Range and Cycle, so a fader box or a pedal can switch it on and drift its range live, no mouse required
• The MIDI Stream Log gets four views: Events, Notes, Channels and Stats, every log remembering its own, with eight message types in colours you can edit
• DRIFT’s power switch belongs to the rest of the app: a preset states it, a snapshot restores it, and Panic switches it off, so a runaway arp cannot restart the problem it just cleared
• 25 keys as a fourth keyboard size, next to 88, 61 and 49, and the sustain pedal is read properly: switch, continuous, or detected automatically, with an invert for the normally closed ones
• Global Snapshots reorder by dragging, export or delete only the rows you mark, and ⊘ All Off reaches CASCADE and AURA so a look can start from an empty frame

↗ Read the docs

Three additions to AURA, one of which finally has a memory: hold a note in Filament and a glowing thread grows out of it, forks, and fuses with what it touches, so a phrase builds one lit net instead of springing back like every other style. FORGE stops treating its rack as one machine: every effect now carries its own size, its own clock and its own place on the keyboard, so a Glitch can sit under your left hand while a Vortex answers on the right. The camera gets a floor to stand on, so focus and fog measure real distance instead of filtering the picture. And the app finally has one tempo, in the toolbar, where everything that ticks can find it.

• Block Terrain: a voxel landscape that rises and falls under your playing, with CC74 pulling the ridge toward you
• Glass Spiral: that same terrain rolled onto a spiral under true perspective
• Filament: the first style that remembers, a held note grows a glowing thread and the whole net drifts into the depth and dissolves there
• Every FORGE effect on its own controls: its own size and its own clock, fourteen effects that used to share one global dial. Motion Speed is gone because nothing needs it any more
• Place each effect where you play it: 12 or 88 keys, centered, or a mapping of its own, chosen per effect instead of once for the whole rack
• A ground plane in FORGE: the image lies down, and sharpness and fog measure real depth for the first time
• Kaleidoscope complexity: curved seams, concentric shells and a second offset lattice, all on one dial
• One clock for the whole app: the internal tempo moves into the toolbar as a single pill, and the Conductor, Glitch and Strobe lock to it or to incoming MIDI Clock
• A redrawn interface: one slider style everywhere, labels and readouts on a single line, sections that fold as you open the next, and any control that cannot act right now greys out instead of disappearing
• A Library tab in every module, and the channel filter gets a tab of its own
• Move modules freely: drag a tile anywhere on the grid and it stays there, shift-drag swaps two
• Velocity stands in for pressure across every AURA style, so a short strike shows even without aftertouch

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The Grand Staff gains a fourth mode in which the staves give way to an interval field: one step right is a fifth, the diagonals are thirds, so every major chord becomes the same triangle in every key and transposing simply moves that shape. Alongside it, a new keyboard design, a new FORGE effect, and a quieter change that touches every module: MPE Insight now reads the pitch-bend range your instrument actually reports instead of assuming a standard.

• Weave: the fourth Grand Staff mode, chords as geometry on an interval field
• Pixel Grid: an eighth keyboard design, a lit LED raster in three layouts
• Retro Pixel VHS: a new FORGE pass with scanlines, phosphor dots and chroma tear
• Reads your instrument: every bend is drawn at its true size, from the range your controller reports
• Chords played on a single MIDI channel now show correctly in every module

↗ Read the docs