Verdalis is a suite of audio instruments in which everything is synthesised and nothing is sampled.
Each one models a natural sound source from first principles — the physics of how the sound is actually made — and computes every moment of it while it plays. 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.)
One download contains everything: five instruments, 92 factory presets and 254 parameters, built for both Linux and Windows, with a PDF manual for each. They are native CLAP plugins for x86-64, with sample-accurate note and parameter handling, host modulation, bounded CPU cost, preset discovery so the presets appear in the host’s own browser, plain-text preset files, 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.
MIT licensed. More instruments are in progress, and they arrive in this same
download.
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