You have choices about how you want to delay, distort, mutilate, spectrally transform, and edit audio. But Tom Erbe’s legendary SoundHack stands out—and it’s free. And now it’s Apple Silicon-ready.
This week came news that Tom has completed the latest Max/MSP port of unique SoundHack effects – v 0.0.10 – with Apple Silicon support. This brings the full SoundHack library to Apple Silicon Macs. (Plug-ins came late last year.) The free SoundHack material is now available as AU/VST/VST3/AAX plug-ins and as external plug-ins for Max and Pure Data for Mac and Windows. (There is also Linux support in Pd and via Windows VST wrappers for Linux.)
The plug-in selection is the most extensive, but you can also find all of these effects in external form:
- +binaural
- +Sparkling granular delay
- +Chebyshev Polynomial distortion
- +Compand Compressor/Expander
- +decimate Bit depth and sample rate reduction
- +Delay with variable modulation
- +Matrix Center/Side – Left/Right Encoder/Decoder
- +Morph filter
- +Pitch delay with fade
- +Spectral compand
- +Spectral Gate
Some of these are fairly common, but if you have them as external components, you don’t have to search around forums to find someone who has already patched them into Pd and Max. Some are a bit more exotic, and I find that too often commercial plug-in developers make everything a bit too nice and well-behaved. You miss out on some retro, classic, and harder/buggier possibilities depending on the effect. The developer, Tom Erbe, teaches this style of music programming, and what you get is pure classic and sometimes destructive sounds. Whether you get the plug-in or play around with your own Max, Max for Live, and Pd patches, there’s plenty of fun to be had here.
As for platform support, the current state of affairs is as follows:
- 64-bit macOS Apple Silicon: Plug-ins, externals for Max/MSP
- 64-bit macOS Intel: Plug-Ins, External for Max/MSP, External for Pd
- 64-bit Linux: Pd-Externals (and you should be able to use the plug-ins with a wrapper)
- 32-bit Linux: Pd-External
- 64-/32-bit Windows: Plug-ins, external for Max/MSP, external for Pd
- 32-bit Macs (Intel and PowerPC): Original SoundHack application – only works on macOS versions with Carbon support, i.e. macOS Mojave 10.14 and earlier
(Note that the source code seems to be available only for the original SoundHack; the rest is free as beer.)
I also asked about Pure Data; the binary download is only for Intel (just tried it), but Tom tells me that Deken compatibility (for automatic builds for your platform within Pd) and ARM/Apple Silicon compatibility should be back soon.
It’s amazing to see SoundHack from 1991 still around. It was my first introduction to experimental music production because of its unique convolution effect. And wow, there’s even a tutorial:
All downloads:
https://www.soundhack.com/freeware/
Now that you’ve stocked up on free stuff, there’s also a Back to School Sale in August with 50% off all of Tom’s excellent paid items. Enter the code “Gjekstad” at checkout. (Is that a reference to the Norwegian handball player?!)
