I hear crackles or dropouts

Raise the audio buffer size in your DAW’s audio settings, for example from 128 to 256 samples. Crackles usually mean the CPU cannot keep up; more points, and a higher Count on each, cost more. Freezing tracks in your DAW (its track freeze, not Warp Filter’s Freeze button) or bouncing finished tracks also helps.

Does it add latency?

No. Warp Filter runs at zero added latency, so it never shifts your track’s timing.

Which methods does Warp Filter use?

Each in plain words first, then the name to look it up by, and what it costs:

  • The bands. Each band is a narrow peaking filter, built as a zero-delay-feedback state-variable filter: it stays stable while its frequency sweeps fast and adds no latency. Each band costs CPU, so a point costs more the higher its Count.
  • The endless sweep. Each point is a stream of bands that fade in at one end of the spectrum and out at the other, so it seems to rise or fall forever without arriving: the idea of a Shepard tone, made of resonant bands.
  • Resonance that saturates. With Drive above 0, each band’s resonance is softly limited inside the filter, a tanh on its band-pass state, its limit coming down to about −6 dBFS by Drive 5 %, so a loud peak softens and breaks up as an analog filter’s does when it meets its supply rails.
  • Drive. Tube saturation, with a hard clip fading in past the middle, its aliasing held down by first-order antiderivative anti-aliasing (ADAA) instead of oversampling. It removes about as much aliasing as 2x oversampling would, at no latency.
  • The soft limiter. A tanh knee on what the plugin adds: untouched below −2 dBFS, held at −0.1 dBFS. Your dry signal passes around it, so a hot input can still take the output past −0.1 dBFS.
  • Drift. Smooth value noise, a fixed pattern for each cycle, so a synced bounce repeats exactly and a frozen sound stands still.

My presets are missing

Your presets are files in your user folder: ~/Library/Audio/Presets/Sonaut Audio/Warp Filter on macOS, Documents\Sonaut Audio\Warp Filter\Presets on Windows and ~/.config/Sonaut Audio/Warp Filter/Presets on Linux. Show Presets Folder in the preset menu opens it. Reinstalling or updating leaves them untouched.

Nothing moves

A point holds still when its Rate is centered, with its first band settled on the point, and a fresh point starts held, its readout on Hold. Turn Rate off center — right to run the stream up, left to run it down — and check that the point is not bypassed, that Mix is not at 0 % and that Freeze is off.

The window looks wrong, flickers or crashes my DAW when it opens

Warp Filter has the graphics card draw its moving background and the display. If they look wrong or flicker, open Settings with the gear and set GPU Drawing to Off: the CPU then draws them instead, at once, which costs more CPU, and the background becomes a still color; on Windows the system keeps drawing the controls as it always does. If your DAW crashed as the window opened on the graphics card, the next window opens as under Off, and a line under GPU Drawing says why; Auto tries the graphics card again once Warp Filter, the graphics driver or the system is updated. If your DAW still crashes each time the window opens, so Settings is out of reach, quit your DAW, open Warp Filter.settings in a text editor (on a Mac in ~/Library/Application Support/Sonaut Audio/, on Windows in %APPDATA%\Sonaut Audio\, on Linux in ~/.config/Sonaut Audio/) and make its gpuRendering line read <VALUE name="gpuRendering" val="cpu"/>, which is what Off saves, adding that line inside <PROPERTIES> where there is none. GPU Drawing back on Auto lets the graphics card draw again from the next time you open the window.

How do I report a bug?

Email support@sonaut.audio with the plugin version, your operating system, your DAW and version, and the steps that trigger the problem. A short screen recording or a crash log helps a lot.