Audio Damage AD049 Enso v1.0.15 WIN MAC LINUX
Audio Damage has announced the immediate availability of its latest plugin for Windows, Mac and iOS.
An architecturally unique and sonically characterful looping toolkit for producers and live performers, inspired by both modern looper pedals and vintage tape-based setups, Enso combines elegant and intuitive UI design with a deep but accessible feature set and stellar sound quality.
Enso’s operation will be immediately familiar to users of hardware looper pedals or plugins such as Ableton Live’s bundled Looper. Start playback of the host DAW, hit Enso’s record button and capture your instrumental performance into a loop of whatever length you like, up to ten minutes (five minutes on iOS). Then, without stopping playback, overdub further passes to create layered grooves, complex harmonic textures, or dense, evolving soundscapes.
Beyond those basics, though, Enso takes software looping into new territory. Two Overdub modes configure the plugin for conventional looper pedal behavior or Frippertronics-style ‘dual tape deck’ manoeuvres, affecting the handling of the Feedback parameter for an endless range of layering possibilities; and up to four Sectors can be effortlessly defined, each with its own start and end points, for on-the-fly rearrangement of the loop.
With Enso, time and motion become truly fluid, as speed and direction are handled completely independently for playback and recording, the ‘through-zero’ bipolar Speed controls smoothly transitioning from forwards to backwards, and vice versa, in real time. Want to record forwards at half speed, while simultaneously playing the buffered loop in reverse at 1.25x? Of course you do…
Onboard tape-style saturation, filtering and chorus effects bring dirt, frequency-shaping and stereo thickening to the party; and a comprehensive MIDI assignment system makes it a snap to set your MIDI pedal or button controller up for operation of all Enso’s buttons and switches. With its animated play and record heads, meanwhile, the looping waveform display provides a clean, clear visual representation of the potentially mind-bending temporal acrobatics taking place, letting you get a handle on exactly what’s happening at a glance.
Giving you everything you need for limitlessly creative looping, on stage and in the studio, Enso is one of Audio Damage’s most beautifully realized plugins yet, and an empowering addition to any musician’s arsenal of effects
AD049 ENSO FEATURES:
Full Automatic Looping Engine
Enso’s looping engine is simple to learn, but exceedingly powerful, with “one button” looping control, both host-synced and free time.
- Dub In Place
Enso can either work like a traditional digital looper, where the input is mixed with the buffer contents, then sent to effects, or like a tape looper, where the effects and speed changes are included in the feedback path.
- Sector Crossfading
Define four different start and end points. Crossfade between them, and overdub or re-record within them. - Effects Section
Enso has user-controllable “tape style” saturation and hiss, high- and low-pass filters, and a stereo chorus for thickening and carving your loop. - Full MIDI CC Implementation
Enso has an assignable MIDI CC page for controlling most features of the looping engine. It is tuned for foot control, but will work with any MIDI CC source. - Independent Play And Record Head Control
Both the play and record heads have a through-zero speed control, from -4x to +4x, with text entry values and selectable inc and dec values. - Multi-Format Audio Loader
Enso can load AIFF, WAV, Broadcast WAV, FLAC, MP3, and Ogg in any sample rate, bit depth, and channel configuration. - Buffer Save
Enso can save its buffer contents as a WAV file. - Extra Long Loops
Enso can record or load up to 10 minutes of audio (5 minutes in iOS version) in Long Memory mode. - Cross-Platform Preset Format
Enso utilizes an XML-based preset manager, and optionally stores the buffer within the preset for easy asset management. Work between multiple systems without troubles, make a preset on your desktop machine and paste it to the iOS version with Handoff, easily share your creations with your friends, or make a preset bundle to sell, no asset management required. - Fully Resizable Hi-Dpi/Retina GUI
Enso’s vector-based GUI is resolution-agnostic, and displays the same on every system and resolution. Easily resize the UI (per instance) to match your visual needs, from postage stamp to poster-sized.
V1.0.15 Changelog:
>> Much smooth. Very declicking. Wow. We have done a lot of work to minimize edge- and corner-case clicking, principally in the Sectors. You will find that, in general, the Sector features work much better, and there will be no (or minimal, in the case of legato source material) clicks when resizing and moving sectors while playback is occuring.
>> Settings were not recalled correctly when restoring a session in some hosts. This has been fixed.
>> MIDI notes added as sources in the CC Control section. You can now assign a MIDI note to a momentary button the same way you would a controller button.
>> In all quantization modes, the playback and record speed controls now go _towards_ zero when clicking or dragging down, and _away_ from zero when clicking or dragging up. There were some differences of opinion with respect to the various speed quantizations, and this has been remedied.
>> The main mode quantization now affects every momentary button except Trigger and Overdub. What this means: sector switching, RTZ, and sector clear will now respect the quantization. So if you have it set to quarter notes, your sector will switch on the beat.
>> A whole heap of small bug fixes, improvements, and optimizations. We tend to write “optimizations” in the changelog to make it look like we did something clever, but in point of fact we, and every other software company on the planet, use “optimizations” to mean “now that we’re not in a dead rush to get this thing out the door so we can make some money and not, you know, go out of business or whatever, we have the luxury of going back and cleaning up this rat’s nest and making it look somewhat presentable.” Stuff like that.
>> Factory presets added back to the iOS version. They somehow got kicked out of bed in the multiple updates that platform needed.
>> macOS preset location moved from Old N’ Busted “Application Support/Audio Damage” to the New Hotness, “~/Music/Audio Damage”. If you have presets stored in the old location, you will need to manually move them to the new one.
>> Ubuntu Linux x64 VST and VST3 added to the desktop payload.
