12 bit sauce filter

What F(ilter)12 is

A filter with a lo-fi section in front of it and an adaptive correction sitting on top. The correction is called AURA. Things sit better with it on: what was crowding gets out of the way, what was hiding comes forward, and the record breathes without sounding like anything was done to it.

We are not going to tell you how. Turn it off and on over a mix you know well — that is the only explanation that has ever landed. MAX AURA is the same thing turned all the way up.

The lo-fi section

SAMPLE RATE and BIT are the crush pair. SAMPLE RATE slows the rate the audio is sampled at, so the top goes and what was up there folds back down as new content. BIT coarsens the steps it is measured in, so quiet detail rounds off and what is left picks up a hard edge. Twelve bits is as clean as this gets. It only goes down from there.

The filter

• POSITION sets where in the spectrum the filter sits. The further it works the more it drives and the more it sings — built in, not something to dial in.
• Five shapes: low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, notch, and a morph that runs from a closing low-pass, through untouched in the middle, to an opening high-pass.
• SLOPE is how steeply it falls away past the corner, and whether the circuit feeds its own distortion back through itself.
• Eight resonance shapes — a wah, a vowel, a comb, a scoop, a hollow, twin peaks, a stack of notches, and flat. They sit at fixed distances from wherever the filter is, so the whole shape travels with the knob.
• DRIVE, RESO, Q and MIX. RESO decides how much resonance; Q decides how narrow.

Moving the filter

Two ways, one at a time — engaging either releases the other, because both driving the same cutoff means neither knob does what it says.

AUTO FILTER hands it to a clock: a shape, a division, a grid, and SWING to push it off the grid the way an MPC did. SIDECHAIN hands it to a signal instead — what it follows, what it hears, which way it travels, how far, and how eagerly it makes up its mind.

The display

The heavy line is the filter. Behind it is what is going in and what is coming out. The field of pixels is AURA, drawn honestly: green where it is adding, red where it is taking away, nothing where it has no opinion.

Formats and compatibility

On macOS, F(ilter)12 installs as an Audio Unit (AU) and a VST3 plug-in, plus a standalone application. macOS 10.13 or later, universal binary for both Apple Silicon and Intel.

On Windows it is a VST3. Windows 10 or later, 64-bit. It arrives as a zip you drop into your VST3 folder; there is no installer yet, and the standalone joins the Windows drop when the installer is signed.

Zero samples of latency. Any sample rate your session runs at. No internet connection required after activation.

Price

$49, and DRUGS — a one-knob bus compressor, sold on its own here — comes with it at no extra cost.