Creative Effects
CHRONOSLIP
Creative micro-looping, granular time manipulation and spatial effects, over a buffer that is always listening.
Free 10-day trial. The download is the whole collection, 22 plug-ins in one installer, so you can try every one; start CHRONOSLIP's trial from inside the plug-in when you are ready. Downloading does not start it, and trying one plug-in does not start the others.
- AU (macOS)
- VST3
- AAX
- macOS Universal
- Windows 64-bit
- v1.0.0
What it does
Capture reveals. It does not record.
Chronoslip is always listening. From the moment it loads it writes everything you play into a rolling buffer, eight seconds deep by default and up to thirty, so Capture does not start recording: it reveals what has already been recorded. You play a phrase, decide afterwards that you wanted it, and press a button. The phrase is already there.
What you do with it then is the rest of the plugin: two engines, six modes and five routing topologies deciding how they see each other: including one where each hears the other through a bounded feedback path.
TIMEFIELD is a single macro running from short, precise and full-bandwidth to long, wide and band-limited, moving every time constant and the effective bandwidth together so that every position on the knob is a coherent place to be.
Key features
MEMORY owns the past
Drift is a varispeed micro-loop: speed and pitch move together, forwards or backwards, ±4×, with musical stops if you want them. Suspend is granular: time and pitch come apart, so a playhead can traverse the loop at any rate including zero while grains read at unity pitch. Impulse follows your playing, latching the current fragment while you play and releasing it when you stop.
SPACE owns the present
Bloom is a feedback delay network that Shape morphs from discrete reflections to a smeared cloud. Echo is a stereo delay whose colour lives inside the feedback loop, so the tail darkens as it decays rather than being filtered once. Slipstream replays a rolling window at a chosen rate: short windows behave like immediate pitch shifting, long ones trail behind as displaced, harmonised phrases.
Five routing topologies
Deciding how the two engines see each other, including Interactive, where each hears the other through a bounded feedback path.
One macro that stays coherent
TIMEFIELD moves every time constant and the effective bandwidth together, so there is no position on it that is a broken combination of settings.
Zero latency, and no allocation on the audio thread
Every algorithm is causal, so the plugin reports 0 samples and means it. That no heap allocation happens while processing is tested rather than asserted: the suite counts every allocation across all 45 combinations of routing, MEMORY mode and SPACE mode, with capture and overdub engaged and every parameter automated.
A framework-free engine
The whole DSP core is plain C++20 with no plugin framework, which is why its test suite builds in about a second and gets run rather than skipped.
The interface
Audio
Audio demos for CHRONOSLIP are not published yet.
We would rather show you nothing than show you a demo that was not recorded through this plugin.
Measured
Release audit (Docs/Release.md), ChronoslipBench and the test suites (Docs/TESTING.md)
- CPU, worst case: SUSPEND with BLOOM at High quality
- 1.63 % of one core · 62× realtime
- Reported latency
- 0 samples
- Heap allocations while processing, all 45 routing × mode combinations
- none
- Null test, 13 cases including captures, licensing compiled in and authorised
- bit-identical
- pluginval, strictness 10
- VST3 and AU both pass
- auval
- succeeds
Figures are produced by this plugin’s own test suite and benchmark, on the hardware and sample rate named above. They are not estimates.
Controls
MEMORY
- Mode
- Drift, Suspend or Impulse.
- SPAN
- How much of the past to take, 20 ms to 4 s.
- MOTION
- Speed and direction, −4× to +4×; centre is frozen. In Drift pitch follows; in Suspend it does not.
- FRAGMENT
- Grain size in Suspend, the latched piece's length in Impulse.
- REGEN
- How much of each overdub layer survives the next pass.
TIMEFIELD
- Routing
- Parallel, Memory to Space (the default), Space to Memory, Interactive or Split Stereo.
- TIMEFIELD
- The macro: short, precise and full-bandwidth to long, wide and band-limited.
- BALANCE
- Between the two engines; both at full at centre.
- MIX
- Against the dry signal.
- FOCUS
- From a mono-safe centre to full width.
SPACE
- Mode
- Bloom, Echo or Slipstream.
- TIME
- Room size, delay time or window length, depending on the mode.
- SHAPE
- Diffusion. In Slipstream, above halfway it quantises to whole semitones.
- FEEDBACK
- Decay, repeats, or the interval stacked on itself.
- TONE
- Dark to bright, inside the loop, so it compounds as the tail decays.
Performance
- CAPTURE
- Reveal the immediate past. Right-click for Retrospective or Punch; in Punch, a double-click empties the loop.
- OVERDUB · REVERSE · HOLD
- Layer into the loop; flip its direction; freeze the region while speed and grains stay live.
- FREEZE · CLEAR
- Sustain SPACE indefinitely; silence the loop but keep it captured.
- MUTATE · RESTORE
- A restrained variation of the patch that never touches modes, routing or levels, and its undo.
ADVANCED
- SYNC · Division
- Locks Echo and Memory's span to the host tempo.
- QUANTISE · PING-PONG · INVERT
- Snaps Motion to ±4, ±2, ±1, ±0.5; alternates Echo's repeats (reverses Slipstream's traversal); makes Impulse latch on silence.
- MODE
- Modern, Weathered or Spectral: the character TIMEFIELD takes on, and how Echo handles a change of time.
- INPUT · OUTPUT
- ±24 dB. OUTPUT opens at +3 dB, which restores the level a fresh instance would otherwise lose.
- DENSITY · JITTER · SPREAD · SENSE
- Grain overlap, scatter and stereo width in Suspend; Impulse's trigger threshold.
- WIDTH · PRE-DELAY · LOW CUT · HIGH CUT · MOD · PITCH
- SPACE's width, pre-delay, in-loop filters, movement, and Slipstream's interval of ±24 semitones.
- HISTORY
- 2 to 30 seconds of buffer. Not automatable, because changing it reallocates.
MODULATION
- L1 · L2
- Two LFOs, seven shapes, free or synced, with bipolar depth.
- ENV · RND
- An envelope follower, and a random source with its own rate and a SMOOTH switch.
- Targets
- Right-click a depth knob to choose what it moves, from sixteen destinations that are safe to move continuously.
- DRIFT
- Slow, bounded movement across several destinations at once.
- MUTATE
- The amount: how far the MUTATE button moves a patch.
Header
- Preset · SAVE
- Browse the factory bank and your own presets; save yours.
- QUALITY
- Eco, Standard or High: the interpolator and grain budget.
- Power
- Bypass.
Technical details
- Formats, macOS
- AU · VST3 · AAX
- Formats, Windows
- VST3 · AAX
- Operating system
- macOS 10.15 or later · Windows 10 or later, 64-bit
- Architecture, macOS
- Universal: Apple Silicon and Intel
- Architecture, Windows
- 64-bit
- Plugin code
- Cslp
- Version
- 1.0.0
- Latency
- 0 samples. Every algorithm is causal; nothing looks ahead.
- CPU
- 1.63 % of one core in the worst case, SUSPEND with BLOOM at High quality
- Factory presets
- 30
In ten categories: Subtle, Rhythmic, Reverse, Granular, Frozen, Ambient, Degraded, Experimental, Sound Design and Performance. Loading one resets everything first, and a preset never starts performing: Capture, Freeze and Overdub are always cleared on load.
Worth knowing
- Randomisation locks work but have no interface, and MIDI learn is not implemented. Both are stated in the product's own documentation.
- Modulation runs at block rate, so there is no audio-rate modulation, and each of the four sources has one destination. Slipstream does not preserve formants.
Also in these bundles
COMPLETE COLLECTION
Get CHRONOSLIP as part of COMPLETE COLLECTION, 22 plugins worth 708 for 199.
199
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