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

Hello friends,

It’s time for another update on the development progress for Anukari. I’ve been hard at work since the last update, and it’s getting more usable every day.

The biggest feature I’ve been working on over the last couple of months is modulation. Right now, this includes modulation through MIDI control as well as simple LFOs. But eventually it will include envelopes, envelope followers, DAW automation parameters, and more.

The neat thing about modulators in Anukari is that the “modulation matrix” that shows which parameters are targeted for modulation by which sources (LFOs, etc.) is completely in the 3D visuals. Modulators are created by adding objects in the 3D physics world, and then you connect them to their targets by dragging visual connection lines to them (similar to springs, or the way that microphones and exciters connect to other entities). So, instead of a big table of modulation matrix information, you just look at the 3D world and see it.

Modulators are quite flexible. They are recursive, so you can have modulators modulating modulators that modulate modulators (try saying that three times out loud!). And, of course, they support feedback, so you can create loops in the modulation matrix to get complex oscillations.

The LFOs are not actually limited to low frequencies as their name might suggest, but are simulated at sample rate and thus can be set to audio frequencies if desired. This means that you can use LFOs to modulate oscillator frequency, and thus Anukari can be used to do rather powerful Frequency Modulation (FM) synthesis.

Pretty much all of Anukari’s parameters can be modulated, so there are endless possibilities here.

Today I released a super-detailed walk-through and explainer video for Anukari. Over the last few months, I’ve only been posting short demo videos, with little explanation of what’s happening in them. This is mostly because there’s just so much engineering work to do, I don’t have a lot of time to spend producing better videos! But I do want to make sure I provide more detail from time to time, so here you go. I’d love to hear your feedback about what topics you’d like me to cover in future videos, so please get in touch.

In November, I flew to London to give a talk about Anukari at Audio Developer Conference 2023 (ADC23). This was a fantastic experience, both in terms of getting technical feedback on Anukari, and in learning about the audio software industry in general. I met quite a few audio plugin developers, and in particular I got to speak with several solo entrepreneurs, and it was great to hear the lessons they learned from building and selling their own boutique audio software.

My talk was recorded and will eventually be available on YouTube, but it might be a couple of months before it’s released. For those who want a head start, the slides I presented are available here. Warning: they are extremely technical! They probably won’t be interesting to anyone who’s not a software engineer themselves.

As always, I really appreciate all the interest and support from everyone following this project. If you’re not already subscribed to this newsletter, consider subscribing! This will be a great way to follow along with the development, and to find out when Anukari will be going into Beta and eventually on sale.

Here are a few more ways to follow along with Anukari’s development:

• Join us on Discord
• Subscribe on YouTube
• Follow us on Twitter
• KVR Audio Megathread

Until next time,
-Evan