SonicBirth

Sonicbirth is the youngest plugin creator software, together with Synthedit, Synthmaker and Max/Msp.
It brings to the Mac plateform what Synthedit has given in Windows since years, and we all know how it has been a good thing to have quantity of high quality freewares and commercial plugins.
So it is a chance to have the opportunity to see such a developpment on OS X too.

It is surprising that after about six months of public live, Sonicbirth has not yet reach a high popularity, it is why I write this little report.

Some features :
- it brings dozens of building elements, some of them like convolution and FFT being yet very rare in modular softwares in general
- it produces VST and AudioUnit plugins
- it has a nice interface, which can be improved, but is currently efficient (at the opposite to the Max/Msp one, personal judgement)
- the learning curve is smooth, but certainly needs a better documentation and tutorials
- it comes with a set of some prebuilt plugins
- you can edit the circuits in a working version of Sonicbirth as a plugin in your host !
- you can "embed" other AU plugins and control their parameters with its own elements
- the demo version is used as a free runtime version for using the distributed plugins (comparable to the Pluggo runtime for Max/Msp built plugins)

At the contrary to Synthedit or Max/Msp, it doesn't support third party extensions at this time, but the number of integrated elements is already impressive, and Antoine Missout is very fast to develop new ones.

Sure, it is not cheap (129 $), needs 10.3.9 as a minimum to run, but on the Mac plateform there is no real alternative in this category : so try it !