What's new in Sonorie: October 2026

The first posts here went up on 5 September. A lot has shipped since, and some of what those posts said is no longer quite true, so this is the catch-up: what Sonorie does now, what it measures, and where the longer write-ups are.

A build takes a few minutes, and you can watch it

The earlier posts said a first version took about a minute. That stopped being true when the builder started doing more work before it lets you hear anything. Over October the median first build took about four minutes; a quarter finished inside two, and nine in ten inside eleven.

The time goes on checking. The model now writes, compiles, measures what it compiled, reads the measurements and corrects itself, sometimes several times, and it renders and runs the interface before shipping it. It asks the plugin framework’s own documentation server for the real declaration of a class rather than guessing at one, which is the commonest way generated C++ fails to compile.

While a first build runs, the preview pane shows the code being written: the DSP and the interface, line by line, with a note when a failed compile sends it back for another take. Closing the tab does not stop it. Reopen the project and the build is still going, or finished.

Instruments

Ask for a synth and you get an instrument, not an effect: it takes MIDI, plays from an on-screen keyboard, from your computer keyboard, or from a MIDI controller, and exports as an instrument plugin your DAW puts on a MIDI track.

Instruments are graded by different physics from effects, because feeding a synth audio and demanding output would fail every correct synth. A generated instrument has to be silent at rest, sound on a note, sit in tune across the keyboard, respond to velocity, survive a chord and stop when the key comes up. Bright designs are also checked for aliasing at the top of the keyboard, where a naive oscillator gives itself away.

Interfaces built from modelled hardware

The biggest change you can see. A generated interface used to draw its own knobs and meters, and drawn meters were the thing most often wrong: an invented scale with a needle that disagreed with its own ticks. Now an interface mounts components:

• 92 knobs, 47 fader caps, 24 switches and 23 lamps, each rendered in 3D under fixed studio lighting, so a turned knob keeps its highlight where a real one would.
• Twelve VU meter faces, each calibrated against its own printed scale, with real ballistics, plus gain reduction read from the compressor itself rather than guessed from its output.
• Spectrum analysers fed by a measurement the host makes, and EQ curves you can drag.
• Any of about 1,960 Google fonts, or your own, embedded in the plugin so it shows the same type in a DAW with no internet connection.

There is a manual editor for the parts you want to do by hand: move things, change colours and type, swap a knob for another model, change a meter’s face. The long version is its own post.

Hardware emulations from the literature

The DSP library the model writes against gained circuit-level models: an optical compressor with a photocell that remembers, a FET compressor whose feedback loop is solved every sample, VCA compression, tape with magnetic hysteresis and the recording-standard EQ curves, triode stages with grid current, a guitar tone stack, a fuzz pedal solved from its schematic, spring and plate reverbs. Each one is measured against the published figures. That is written up here.

Edits change what you asked for, and nothing else

“A bit more drive” used to risk a plugin that came back redesigned. Changes are now patches: the model edits the lines that need editing, and everything else stays byte for byte as it was. A request is routed by what it touches: a change to the look reuses the compiled sound exactly, and a change to the sound inside the same controls keeps the faceplate you had. Only a request that needs new controls goes back through the full build.

A change to the look is also judged against the version it replaces. If the new one has lost a meter, a switch, a lamp or a display you did not ask to remove, or has grown much taller for no reason, it goes back for another attempt, and if it is still worse when the attempts run out you keep the version you had.

You can attach a screenshot to a request and point at the part you mean. Every change can be undone in one click, a project keeps its last fifty versions in History, and a pinned brief (“it’s for a drum bus”, “keep it mono-safe”) is carried into every turn of the project.

Exports

Unchanged in substance, and now measured: an export produces VST3, AU, CLAP and LV2 plus a standalone application, with the full source project. If you pick “binaries”, Sonorie compiles it for you, with no compiler on your side. Over October the median export took about a minute and a half for Windows, two minutes for Linux and four for macOS.

Two honest limits. macOS builds are ad-hoc signed, which is enough to install them on your own Mac and not enough to hand them to other people; that needs your own Apple Developer ID and notarisation. And there is no AAX, which needs Avid’s agreement. The formats post explains why.

A marketplace that sells binaries

You can publish a plugin and sell it. It is compiled for all three systems before it goes on sale, screenshots are rendered from its real interface, buyers get a licence key that activates on three computers and works offline for a year at a time, and you keep 80% of the price. Sellers get a store page and buyers can leave reviews you can answer. How that works.

Smaller things

• Your projects open as a grid of pictures of each plugin’s interface, with search.
• A plugin’s interface looks the same on a phone as on a desktop.
• A thumbs-down on a change offers to restore the version before it.
• There is a referral programme: share your link and earn build credit when somebody you referred subscribes. The terms have the details.