TiDE, in neon, standing over dark water; the reflection beneath it reads EDiT.

TiDE Rack

A modular synth that lives inside your DAW.

TiDE Rack is a patching environment that runs as a plugin. Your DAW supplies the audio and the MIDI; you supply the patch.

It ships with a fixed set of built-in modules — oscillators, filters, envelopes. Everything arrives with the plugin; there is nothing to install alongside it and nothing to download into it.

TiDE Rack is the first plugin from TiDE Synth — hence the address. If there are others, they will appear here.

Status: early. Version 0.1.3 does one thing, and does it end to end — load in a DAW, wire an oscillator and an envelope to an output, play it from your keyboard, and still be there when you reopen the project. Everything past that is unfinished.

Download

Version 0.1.3, free, the same build for everyone. Each link always points at the newest release.

On macOS, open TIDE-Rack-AUv3.app once after installing. The Audio Unit lives inside that app and macOS does not register it until the app has been launched, so until you do, the AUv3 will not appear in your host. The VST3 needs no such step.

On Linux the archive carries a short install.sh that copies the VST3 into ~/.vst3/ and the CLAP into ~/.clap/.

iOS is not ready. An AUv3 for iPad and iPhone is intended and partly built, but it has never run on a real device and has not been submitted to the App Store. There is nothing to link to yet; when there is, it will be here.

Older versions, and the source, are on the releases page.

Price

TiDE Rack is free. There is no paid version, no trial period, and no licence key.

It runs on donations. If it turns out to be useful, there is a link below; the plugin itself will not bring it up.

Buy Jeff a coffee.

Formats

Community

Questions, patches to show off, or just following along — the TiDE Synth Discord is where development gets discussed.

Source

TiDE Rack is open source, under the ISC licence. The code, plan and working notes are in the TiDE Synth repository at github.com/JeffMcClintock/TideSynth.