Sonic Charge updates all products - VST3 support and more

Sonic Charge has updated all its products, including the free Cyclone, with bug fixes and some new features.

Most importantly, all products are now VST3 compatible. They look and sound identical in all three formats (VST2, VST3, and AU), and they take up about the same amount of CPU.

Echobode and Bitspeek now allow MIDI mapping of knobs and support program changes with MIDI notes or MIDI Program Change messages.

The graphics resolution of Echobode, Bitspeek, and Permut8 has been increased to give you full "retina" quality with 200% zoom.

A few bugs have been eliminated and a bunch of compatibility issues have been resolved.

Cyclone, the free TX16W emulator, has been updated for the first time in almost ten years. It now works on Mac again (and Windows still) in all three supported formats. It now has high-resolution graphics and a few new features (right-click for a menu).

Sonic Charge says:

We recommend everyone to update to the new versions. The only reason you would not want to update is if you are running 32-bit Windows, as we removed support for this now.

Detailed information on the VST3 ports:

• In hosts where VST3 replaces VST2 (e.g., Cubase), Sonic Charge has made every possible effort to ensure that everything sounds the same when you load old projects.
• MIDI out (notes only) should work in Microtonic and Synplant.
• MIDI Program Change messages are supported, but many VST3 hosts do not seem to implement the support.
• "Learning" of MIDI CC numbers is supported, provided it is implemented by the VST3 host (at the time of this writing, it is not supported in Ableton Live, for example).
• Because of limitations in VST3, you cannot assign the same MIDI CC to more than one parameter in Microtonic.
• The following features in Microtonic do not work and are disabled: "MIDI CC operate on selected channel", "MIDI CC generate parameter automation", "Improved scaling of MIDI CC values" and "Knobs and buttons send MIDI CC".
• You cannot turn the individual pattern steps on and off with MIDI CC in Microtonic.
• A .vstpreset file is the complete program bank, not a single preset.