Verdalis is a suite of audio instruments in which everything is synthesised
and nothing is sampled.
Most of them model a natural sound source from first principles — the physics of how the sound is actually made — and compute every moment of it while they play. One of them, WhooshPact, models no natural source at all: it is a production-effects instrument for transitions, impacts and stings, built to the same rule. Nothing is recorded, nothing is looped, and no two instances ever produce the same output. There is no loop point to find, because there is no loop.
That constraint is the point rather than a limitation to work around. A recording arrives with its distance, its surroundings and its particular moment already fixed in it, and no amount of processing moves it somewhere else. A model has none of that baked in: the same sound can be near or far,
sparse or dense, in a small room or an open landscape, and it stays coherent because it is being generated rather than reshaped. Play a note and it starts; hold it and it continues, differently, for as long as you hold it.
The models are measured rather than invented. Each instrument was fitted against real reference recordings — segmented, tracked and measured — and what ships is the measurement: tables of coefficients from which the audio is computed afresh every time. Where a model does not reach far enough, the feature is left out rather than approximated, and each instrument’s documentation says plainly what it does well and what it does not. (One instrument contains a small block of licensed audio for a single hidden, non-instrument function; it is the one documented exception to the rule above, and its licence file records it.)
The odd one out is worth naming, because it is not a nature instrument and is not sold as one. WhooshPact makes the sounds a production needs rather than the sounds the world makes: whooshes, impacts, booms, braams, downshifters and stings. Its references are 211 finished production sounds instead of field recordings, so its measurement describes the target rather than a mechanism. It is an addition to the suite rather than part of its nature collection — reach for it when a cut needs a transition, not when a scene needs weather.
One download contains everything: ten instruments, 194 factory presets and 553 parameters, built for Linux and Windows in both CLAP and VST3, with a PDF manual for each. The two formats are the same plugin — same engine, same presets, same window — so install whichever your host prefers, or both. Every instrument offers sample-accurate note and parameter handling, host modulation, bounded CPU cost, plain-text preset files you can read and edit, and a fixable random seed so a take can be reproduced exactly when you need it to be. The windows are drawn by hand — X11 or Win32 plus Cairo, no toolkit dependency — and share one layout and one set of interactions, so learning one is learning all of them.
Free, and MIT licensed.
How these were made — the AI disclosure
These plugins were vibe coded.
The code was written with AI — Claude — doing most of the typing, working from direction, references and listening notes. That is worth saying plainly before you download something and put it in your sessions, even though it costs you nothing.
What that does not mean is that nobody checked. Every instrument is fitted against real reference recordings and the fit is measured, not eyeballed: the repository records what each model was fitted to, which explanations were tested and thrown out, and where a model still falls short. Every build runs a self-test, every VST3 passes Steinberg’s own validator, and nothing ships until it has been listened to against the reference it imitates — because a number agreeing with a number proves nothing about how something sounds.
What it also means is that the usual caveats apply more than usual. It is free software, given away as-is, and it has been tested by one person on Linux and Windows in Bitwig Studio and Reaper rather than across every host and platform on the market. If something misbehaves in yours, that is useful to know — the source is public and so is the issue tracker.
Did I said MIT? Yes, I did.
So here’s the Github repo, if you want to have a look: https://github.com/Ravetracer/Verdalis