Hello everyone,

After more than two years of development, I am extremely happy to announce that the first public Beta release of Anukari is available for purchase, and a free demo can now be downloaded.

The free demo allows you to use all of Anukari’s features, with the only restriction that periodically the audio from Anukari is replaced with white noise for a few seconds.

MSRP for Anukari is $140, but for a limited time the Beta version will be offered with a 50% discount, for a price of $70. The free demo and purchase options are available at anukari.com.

Since the last newsletter, Anukari has received a huge number of improvements. Some of the highlights include:

• Automatic detection and correction of physics explosions
• Two plugins: an instrument plugin and an effect plugin
• 200+ instrument and effect presets
• 10 skyboxes and 8 3D model skins to choose from
• A new drag-and-drop “palette” for creating new objects in the world
• Simplified click-and-drag controls for the 3D camera
• Color-coding hints when creating new connections between objects
• Tested for compatibility with 17 popular DAWs
• Added AAX plugins for compatibility with Pro Tools
• Fixed innumerable crashes and bugs
• … and too many other usability improvements to list

Anukari now has a detailed user manual and FAQ page, and over the next few weeks we will be releasing a series of concise video tutorials that cover all of Anukari’s features.

Check out the launch announcement video:

Regards,

-Evan

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