Hello everyone,

I'm writing because I've made some fun progress with Anukari in the last couple of months. The pre-alpha test that started in September has been enormously helpful so far. The folks who are testing Anukari are saints for putting up with all sorts of crashes, performance issues, DAW compatibility problems, and so on. But their patience is paying off as I slowly work through these issues to get Anukari closer to an open public release.

While my main priorities are stability and performance, I did go off on a bit of a tangent in the last few weeks while working on MacOS optimizations, and rewrote the 3D graphics code. This was actually an important part of speeding up MacOS, but I went further and made a bunch of improvements to the 3D graphics. In particular I went ahead and made the graphics super-configurable, so you can balance the graphical fidelity with performance as needed. With a simple instrument, you can crank the graphics all the way up, or if you're pushing the limits with a mega-complicated instrument, you can drop down the graphics settings to save all the power for audio processing.

Some of the customizable graphics settings include:

• The "skybox" or 3D environment/background. Anukari will ship with a few presets, and you can also load arbitrary skyboxes you find on the internet or even create them yourself.
• The actual 3D models for the instrument components, like mallets, mics, etc. Again, Anukari will ship with some presets, but for advanced users it will be possible to completely replace them.
• Bloom effect, lens flare, bokeh effect.
• Sun color, position, intensity.

I'm really excited with the degree of visual customization that's now possible. You can really make the instrument your own, and give it the proper kind of visuals for the music you're making.

In addition to the graphics options, there are many new features in terms of how the instrument is animated. For example, the spherical bodies now get larger/smaller based on their mass, and their surface gets duller/shinier based on their damping. Springs get thicker with higher stiffness settings. All of the virtual link types (the colored lines connecting things) pulse with light based on the signal they are carrying, be it modulation, audio, etc.

This is a big milestone, as revamping the graphics was always something I planned to do before releasing Anukari. Once this work is wrapped up, I can go back to being laser-focused on stability, performance, and usability until the plugin is ready to go public.

Thank you all for your continued interest!

Here are some demo videos showing off what's possible with the new graphics settings:

And some screenshots:

Regards,
-Evan

Hello everyone,

I'm very happy to announce that it's nearly time to begin pre-alpha testing for Anukari. What makes this a "pre-" alpha test? At this stage, Anukari is fully usable, but it is still missing some important features, may still have bugs, etc. So while it's not ready for a broader alpha/beta testing group, I do need to start getting feedback from a small group of more dedicated testers.

I'm going to invite around 10 users total (5 Mac, 5 Windows) to join the pre-alpha. Each invitee will receive a free copy of the current version of Anukari, and the license will automatically upgrade to a free copy of Anukari v1 when that comes out.

If you're interested in being part of the pre-alpha, please fill out the pre-alpha interest registration form. I am hoping to get a group of testers who are using a wide variety of computer hardware, MIDI devices, DAW software, operating systems, and so on. I will go through the results and hand-pick a small group of people as testers. If I don't pick you, I'm sorry! There will be future testing rounds.

Don't fill out the form if you're not willing to help me debug issues with Anukari on your machine -- wait for the real alpha in that case!

Regards,
-Evan

Hello everyone,

It's been a while since I wrote about my progress on Anukari! There's a lot to catch you up on, but in this email I mostly wanted to let you know that Anukari finally has a real website available at https://anukari.com. If you ever saw the previous website, you'll know that it was nothing more than a placeholder. The new website has a lot more information about Anukari.

I also wanted to let you know that the newsletter that you may have signed up for on Substack will now be coming directly from me instead of from Substack. If you previously used Substack to look at old newsletter posts, you can now instead read them here.

I've gotten a HUGE amount of work done on the plugin since I wrote the last update. I will list some of the highlights here, and I hope to go into detail on some of these in future newsletter updates and YouTube demo videos:

• Anukari now works on MacOS (in addition to Windows)
• There's an on-screen tuner available
• Any instrument can be made auto-polyphonic
• Midi Polyphonic Expression (MPE) is fully supported (tested with ROLI Seaboard)
• All MIDI modulation sources are supported
• Envelope followers and generators
• DAW automation lanes supported
• Vastly more usable user interface for Modulator target assignment/adjustment
• MIDI "sense" feature to learn CC# by turning knobs, etc
• Almost all parameters can now be modulated
• Comprehensive testing in place to assure reliability
• Hundreds of bug-fixes

Another thing to stay tuned for is that now that the new website is live, I am getting extremely close to launching an invite-only pre-alpha test, where the first few real users will receive free copies of an early Anukari release to test and provide feedback. I hope to start that within a month or so, and it will certainly be announced in this newsletter.

As always, please stay in touch! It's incredibly valuable to me to hear from anyone who may potentially use Anukari when it's released. Feedback, suggestions, and complaints are all welcome. So feel free to email me directly, or come chat on Discord.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and thanks for your support.

Regards,
-Evan