Splice Rent-To-Own Launch

Get harder mixes for the price of a coffee

We've teamed up with Splice to offer our latest plugin IHNY-2 via their popular Rent-To-Own model. This means you can get one of the hardest hitting compressors in the industry for the price of $4.99 per month – for 14 months.

It's like an extra cappuccino each month, except this one has triple-shot strength and will make your drums slap harder than ever!

What we like about Splice's RTO model is that you actually get to own the plugin in the end. So it's not like a subscription that ties you in with no end-date – and leaves you with nothing when it's over.

And if you decide IHNY-2 is not for you, you can of course cancel anytime.

We think the RTO model is probably the most fair way to get plugins at a low monthly cost, and our users have been asking us for such an option. So we're beyond excited to have joined forces with Splice. With a bit of luck more of our products will launch there soon as well.

Grab IHNY-2 now to get your mixes hitting harder!

IHNY-2 v1.0.1 Update Out Now

We’ve just released an update of our latest plugin IHNY-2. The update introduces a number of minor bug fixes as well as an optimized XY pad that now adapts to the Tweak panel (as requested by some users).

Download it in the Free Trials section of our website – or by following the instructions in your original order email.

The update is free for all owners of IHNY-2.

Magic Switch: Free Chorus VST Plugin

To get Magic Switch for free, head to our Freebies Section.

What is Baby Audio’s Magic Switch?

Magic Switch is a free VST, AU and AAX chorus plugin for Mac and PC, developed by Baby Audio. It’s based on the “Magic” parameter in our award-winning Super VHS plugin. Magic Switch strips the Super VHS “Magic” feature into its own free plugin to give you instant, dreamy 1980s Juno Chorus vibes.

In the below we’ll go through some of the typical questions about chorus effects to get you more familiar with Magic Switch.

What is a chorus effect in music?

Chorus is one of the original cheat codes for making music sound thicker and richer. In fact, it goes all the way back to the classical ages. The effect occurs when the same sound is played back in multiple “instances” that each have slightly different time and pitch variations. Imagine a string ensemble: Each musician could play the same notes, but it would be virtually impossible for their timing and pitch to be 100% identical all the time. The resulting pitch/time variations are perceived by our human ears as making the music sound richer and deeper. (And quite frankly it is as there’s more information for our ears to process).

The metaphor of the ‘string ensemble’ is actually not so far off when we talk electronic chorus effects. In Korg’s Polysix synthesizer, the built-in chorus option is simply called “Ensemble”.

What is a chorus plugin?

A chorus effect, whether in plugin, pedal or hardware form is an attempt to simulate the ensemble effect of several musicians playing the same notes with subtle variations. This is done by taking a signal and mixing it with one or more copies of itself, which differ in pitch and time. Typically, these differences will be created by an LFO that modulates the copies relative to the original audio source.

A stereo chorus keeps the pitch and time differences separated between the left and right channel. This makes the stereo image feel wide and magical. Magic Switch does this quite well (hence the name).

The chorus FX parameters explained:

All chorus effects will share some of the same parameters, but there’s a difference in whether or not these parameters are exposed to the user. In the case of Magic Switch, we’ve set the parameters exactly how we feel they need to be to give you that wide and dreamy 1980s sound with the click of a button. You could call this a curated approach.

On the other hand, if you’re using stock audio plugins, you’ll probably be given a bunch of parameters to play around with yourself. These are going to vary from plugin to plugin and DAW to DAW – but let’s explore some of the most common features:

• Rate / Speed: This sets the frequency of the low frequency oscillator that’s modulating the signal to create a chorus effect. It sounds a bit complicated, but think of it as the speed at which things go in and out of pitch. For a dreamy effect, you might want something slower and more subtle. A higher rate will sound dizzier, which can work well for more radical sound design.

• Depth / Intensity: Controls the frequency range of the pitch modulation created by the chorus effect. Or in simpler words, this feature sets how much ‘out of tune’ your chorused signal is going to get when it goes out of tune. (It does, remember that’s what a chorus is).

• Width: Controls the chorus width from mono to stereo or anywhere in between.

• Feedback: This is a less common parameter in chorus VSTs, but you’ll sometimes find it in better equipped plugins. It adds a chorus signal back into itself in a feedback loop. This can give you some very intense sounds if that’s your thing.

• Dry / Wet: Use this control if you want less of the chorus effect blended in with your dry original. In Magic Switch, this parameter is useful as the effect can be quite colorful otherwise.

What is a Juno Chorus?

The “Juno Chorus” refers to the on-board chorus effect in Roland’s Juno-series of synthesizers from the 1980s (such as the Juno-106 and Juno-60). The Juno Chorus was a one-button chorus effect that could only be either engaged or disengaged, but not fine-tuned by the user. (Hint: It was usually engaged!). To give some variation, Roland equipped the Junos with two effects, chorus 1 and 2, which offered different levels of intensity.

The Juno Chorus was created by a set of Bucket Brigade Delays (BBD), which gave it its distinct analog character. We’ll explain this concept another time as it almost warrants its own blog post.

So what’s so magical about the Juno Chorus?

Well, frankly, it was just incredibly well tuned by the legendary company that had already developed the famous Dimension D and Boss CE-2 chorus effects. The Juno Chorus was engineered by Roland - to perfection - to complement the character of the Junos’ Saw and Square oscillators. As with anything in audio, it’s all about doing things that vibe with each other, and the Juno Chorus vibed with the synth that hosted it in a way that almost ended up defining the sound of an era.

In fact, we’d argue that the Juno Chorus was as much an achievement by Roland in sound design as in engineering. This is what inspired us to create our own ‘sound design engineered’ one-button chorus effect in the form of Magic Switch.

Magic Switch is not meant to be a Juno chorus emulation. Instead, it’s meant to be an ideal chorus effect for this day and age of digital music production – where tracks are cleaner than ever and often in need of some character and soul. As a result, you’ll find Magic Switch to be darker and more detuned than the Juno Chorus. This is how we think a one-button chorus VST should sound today!

The one and only Juno-106. Some people say it’s not as ‘meaty’ in the low-end as the Juno-6 or Juno-60 – but to our ears it’s synth perfection.

Is Magic Switch the best free chorus plugin?

Magic Switch is our best attempt at designing the perfect free chorus plugin. One that’s simple enough to not obstruct your workflow – and lush enough to elevate your tracks. Why don’t you try it out and see how you like it? It’ll cost you absolutely nothing!

Written by Baby Audio founder Caspar Bock.

Update May 2023. Thanks to Bedroom Producer’s Blog for naming Magic Switch among the best free chorus plugins: LINK

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Crystalline iOS Released

Get Crystalline for your iPad/iPhone

Algorithmic reverbs have come a long way! Studio owners in the 1980s would routinely pay tens of thousands of dollars to get digital reverb systems with limited flexibility and imperfect sound.

Today, you can have a more versatile reverb, with crystal clean definition, inside your phone. All for the price of a round of beers.

So if you like the idea of walking around with a professional grade studio in your pocket, you might want to add this one to your arsenal.

Crystalline iOS - out today - is the App version of our premium reverb plugin, for iPad and iPhone devices. It's compatible with all major AUv3 plugin hosts.

Go grab it on the App Store for just $29.99: LINK

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Baby Audio M1 Update

Our plugins are now fully M1 compatible

We're happy to share that we've updated our full suite of plugins for Mac M1 Native compatibility.

If you're on a new Mac, this should make a great impact on CPU performance. And even if you're not, the updates still offer a number of minor tweaks that you'll benefit from. So we recommend you go grab them!

You can update your owned plugins by following the download instructions in your original order email – or head to our Free Trials section to get a demo of any plugin you don’t own yet.

The update is free for any plugins you already own.

We hope you'll enjoy the improvements! Let us know if you experience any issues.

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The ‘Mac vs PC’ of Plugin Design

This is the first in a new series of articles about our approach to plugin development, written by Baby Audio founder Caspar Bock.

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I was recently writing back to a beta tester about a forthcoming plugin. He’d asked me why we chose to hide certain parameters under the hood instead of making them user-controllable – and that’s where the idea for this blog post came up.

We’re often asked about our approach to vst plugin development. We’ve also been asked why our blog is so rarely updated.

The purpose of this forthcoming series of posts is to address both issues!

OK, so back to the beta tester…

He was asking a very reasonable question: Why not give users access to certain parameters that are already in the plugin but hard-coded under the hood?

In coming up with an answer, I thought about the two classic ‘religions’ of personal computing, Mac vs PC. PCs were historically about interconnectivity, modularity and full user customization, whereas Macs had a curated and self-contained nature.

The Mac philosophy was to make systems that were close-ended and 'guardrailed', giving users a smaller space to operate within, but one that was thought-through from A-Z. You couldn't do as much on a Mac, but you also couldn't really screw things up. This suited some users as they could worry less about the tech and more about their actual work. Other users disliked the limitations and opted for the customizable nature of the PC.

Both schools have their pros and cons…

And on a personal level, I've never really been too devoted either way.
However, when it comes to making audio plugins, I've realized that we are more Mac than PC at Baby Audio. Not deliberately, but I can see it looking back (and forward) on our design decisions. We like the idea that you can abuse all the parameters in our products without seriously damaging your output. We like that our plugins offer a sonic experience that is curated and consistent regardless of what you throw at them. We think that intelligently planned guardrails can give the product experience a sense reliability and instil confidence in the user. (And who doesn’t want that from a plugin).

And that’s why we hide certain things…

Some parameters would change the sound too much. Others would clutter the interface and make the music production workflow less intuitive. We don’t want that. So we hard code these parameters under the hood, either statically or dynamically. Leaving the user with just enough flexibility to do something unique and personal but never so much that it overwhelms the creative process.

This will upset some and inspire others…

And that’s exactly how it should be!

Ultimately, the Mac vs PC rivalry benefitted both platforms. And if I look around at the audio plugin landscape, there’s plenty of options for every preference. Some rivalry between us developers is only interesting, and in fact I wonder if there could be even more of it sometimes?