NerDie

What it does

An 8-bit noise machine modelled on the Rumble of Ancient Times, with a pixel panel and a hardware replica you can pinch to zoom. Four voices each take a frequency and one of sixteen waveforms, three LFO registers move pitch or volume, then a resonant low pass filter with voice attack and release. A summing tree runs the voices through three diagrams and eight algorithms, from addition and overflow to ring modulation, XOR and wave shaping. A one bar sequencer records pad hits against its own click or the host clock, and chaos rerolls every register except the page you are editing.

In the demo

Jade builds drones on the play surface in AUM, locking channels to hold them, then dirties them through the filter and the summing algorithms. She records a bar in, plays the pads from a MIDI keyboard in tuning mode, then runs the preset banks.

Worth knowing

The internal LFOs reach only pitch and volume, as on the hardware, though external modulation can reach everything else. A Mac and Windows build is $9.99 from the developer’s site.