Anukari 3D Physics Synthesizer: Beta Released

[buffalo roam]

Congratulations on a very interesting new piece of music software! I've been looking forward to this intro. It installed just fine, and the intro video was clear and helpful. But some work is still needed.

Unfortunately, I"m encountering scratchy sound artifacts in some of the presets when used with a simple mono melody:
Mallet: Membrane Large, Slide Whistle, Spiderweb
Strings: Metallic Alien Cello, Derelict Violin
Pad: Desert Calm

And my computer really heats up during use!

I'm using the latest version of Logic Pro, on an M3 MacBook Pro with Sequoia 15.4.1 and lots of unified memory.

Hope that's helpful.

[anukari-music]

I tried the demo in Bitwig Studio and to my surprise, not a single parameter is exposed to the DAW. Is this a demo limitation? How can we modulate this thing?

Hmm, pretty much all of the presets should have at least a couple parameters that can be modulated. Although in pursuit of keeping the default preset simple, I may have over-simplified by not having any automations in the default preset.

Maybe try out some of the other presets and see if some automations show up. I've tested in Bitwig so things *should* work. (And if not maybe we can talk in DMs and get it sorted out!)

To answer the question about modulation more generally: to add automations you create a "Host Parameter" object and connect it to whatever you want to modulate. You can then select the green connection and change what it modulates.

A much better answer is: over the next few weeks we will be releasing a bunch of tutorial videos, one of which will cover this exact topic, and it will be MUCH better than my poor explanation here.

[anukari-music]

Congratulations on a very interesting new piece of music software! I've been looking forward to this intro. It installed just fine, and the intro video was clear and helpful. But some work is still needed.

Unfortunately, I"m encountering scratchy sound artifacts in some of the presets when used with a simple mono melody:
Mallet: Membrane Large, Slide Whistle, Spiderweb
Strings: Metallic Alien Cello, Derelict Violin
Pad: Desert Calm

And my computer really heats up during use!

I'm using the latest version of Logic Pro, on an M3 MacBook Pro with Sequoia 15.4.1 and lots of unified memory.

Hope that's helpful.

All the presets were developed on a lowly M1, so it should be possible to get it healthy on an M3, though certainly we've not yet worked out all the kinks! Probably the biggest pitfall is that due to using the GPU for audio, Anukari really needs a buffer size of at least ~512 to perform comfortably.

If that doesn't help, or you're already using a larger buffer and it's crackling, it might be helpful if you can send me the developer logs as explained here: https://anukari.com/support/contact.

[buffalo roam]

Congratulations on a very interesting new piece of music software! I've been looking forward to this intro. It installed just fine, and the intro video was clear and helpful. But some work is still needed.

Unfortunately, I"m encountering scratchy sound artifacts in some of the presets when used with a simple mono melody:
Mallet: Membrane Large, Slide Whistle, Spiderweb
Strings: Metallic Alien Cello, Derelict Violin
Pad: Desert Calm

And my computer really heats up during use!

I'm using the latest version of Logic Pro, on an M3 MacBook Pro with Sequoia 15.4.1 and lots of unified memory.

Hope that's helpful.

All the presets were developed on a lowly M1, so it should be possible to get it healthy on an M3, though certainly we've not yet worked out all the kinks! Probably the biggest pitfall is that due to using the GPU for audio, Anukari really needs a buffer size of at least ~512 to perform comfortably.

If that doesn't help, or you're already using a larger buffer and it's crackling, it might be helpful if you can send me the developer logs as explained here: https://anukari.com/support/contact.

Thanks for your reply. Increasing the buffer from 128 (which I was using) to 512 cleaned up some of the presets I listed but still met with scratchy artifacts on Strings: Metallic Alien Cello, Derelict Violin; and Pad: Desert Calm.

I guess the use of GPU for sound makes a computer work harder--I wouldn't know--but my pretty powerful one usually handles a stacked assortment of fairly demanding plugins with ease, without heating up much. I imagine this will present a challenge for many users. I think some work on making the software more efficient would be helpful. Best of luck!

[enCiphered]

I tried the demo in Bitwig Studio and to my surprise, not a single parameter is exposed to the DAW. Is this a demo limitation? How can we modulate this thing?

Hmm, pretty much all of the presets should have at least a couple parameters that can be modulated. Although in pursuit of keeping the default preset simple, I may have over-simplified by not having any automations in the default preset.

Maybe try out some of the other presets and see if some automations show up. I've tested in Bitwig so things *should* work. (And if not maybe we can talk in DMs and get it sorted out!)

To answer the question about modulation more generally: to add automations you create a "Host Parameter" object and connect it to whatever you want to modulate. You can then select the green connection and change what it modulates.

A much better answer is: over the next few weeks we will be releasing a bunch of tutorial videos, one of which will cover this exact topic, and it will be MUCH better than my poor explanation here.

Hmm, that's a bit disappointing to hear. I usually expect plugins to expose all parameters to the DAW by default, as that's kind of the standard and I tend to modulate the hell out of my plugins. That said, I understand if you chose a more manual approach for design or workflow reasons in this case. Still, it does feel a bit cumbersome from a user perspective. I’ll have to think about the purchase, as it might add too much friction to my workflow.

Anyway, congrats and all the best. Very inspiring instrument!

[anukari-music]

Hmm, that's a bit disappointing to hear. I usually expect plugins to expose all parameters to the DAW by default, as that's kind of the standard and I tend to modulate the hell out of my plugins. That said, I understand if you chose a more manual approach for design or workflow reasons in this case. Still, it does feel a bit cumbersome from a user perspective. I’ll have to think about the purchase, as it might add too much friction to my workflow.

Anyway, congrats and all the best. Very inspiring instrument!

A preset in Anukari can have many thousands of parameters, so unfortunately it's not really feasible to expose them all to the DAW by default. For example, on most machines you can have 500 masses, each with several parameters that can be modulated. Or 50 microphones, or 200 oscillators, with all their parameters... etc.

Of course that all might not be your cup of tea. Certainly Anukari is way, way out there and is not going to be what everybody is looking for!

[BazJacuzzi]

This is insane, in a good way. Nothing else comes close in terms of physical modelling as far as I know. Congratulations on making such an innovative instrument.

I'm seeing plenty of automatable parameters in Bitwig btw.

[anukari-music]

This is insane, in a good way. Nothing else comes close in terms of physical modelling as far as I know. Congratulations on making such an innovative instrument.

I'm seeing plenty of automatable parameters in Bitwig btw.

"Insane, in a good way" is very close to my explicit goal, so thank you very much.

[nanostream]

This looks very interesting, but reading that you have to use a buffer of at least 512 samples, even on a M3 machine, is a bummer. How’s the playability of this thing?

I guess I’ll have to try the demo myself, but I can’t see myself going back to larger buffer sizes tbh.

[tq]

I get crackles and artifacts on a M4 Mini as well, but this seems to be solely related to the graphics/GUI drawing. The GPU indicator is relatively low, but it seems to produce random spikes to the GPU (?). As soon as I close the plug in window, I can play the instrument without any artifacts.

This sounds and looks extremely interesting, so I really hope that these issues can be ironed out in the beta phase. I wouldn't mind having a 'construction' and 'player' version, if the nice GUI is too demanding (or an option to close the viewer and just expose some main player parameters that I can manipulate with the controller or MPE).

[nanostream]

I can report almost the same on a M4 Pro (16 GPU cores, 24 GB RAM), macOS 15.4.1, Live 12, VST3.

I'm getting crackles all the time, even with the GUI closed, although it seems to work a bit better than with the interface open. Setting 3d quality/effects to Max speed, even with a buffer of 1024 samples/48k sample rate, didn't help.

According to Live's CPU monitor and per track performance indicator these short spikes are caused by the CPU, I guess. This isn't reflected in Activity Monitor, though, CPU activity is quite low. However, GPU activity is through the roof:

Screenshot 2025-05-01 at 13.42.50.png

That's how it looks like according to Anukari's GPU monitor:

Screenshot 2025-05-01 at 13.42.37.png

Overall the load doesn't seem too high, but the red overload indicator is flashing constantly. This has to be some kind of bug, I hope.

Edit: To test this, I only used the first Minimal (?) preset, which looks and sounds relatively simple.

[BazJacuzzi]

It is demanding in terms of computing power, but if you compare how complex the models are against something like chromaphone then I would say this is much more efficiently coded. The scope of possible sounds is off the charts.

I think having a player view with some basic mappable macros is an excellent idea for a later update.

I'm bowled over, this is a tour de force.

[Tj Shredder]

On my Powerbook M2, at least the MPE patches run just fine in MPE mode. I didn't test all sounds yet...

[tq]

Hm, then the crackles should be a bug - my Mini has the M4Pro chip, 14 CPU cores, 20 GPU, with 48 GB RAM, so this should have more power than the M2 powerbook. When closing the plug in window, it runs just fine, crackles disappear.

[jbraner]

It's pretty much unusable on my Windows 11 AMD Ryzen 3950x (32GB RAM) PC.
Even at buffer size 512 it crackles on just about everything and the whole PC grinds to a halt.
(even if it works OK at buffers - 512, that's not really something I want ot do)

I sent an email to the support address, with the dev files dump - so maybe there's something I can tweak to make it usable.
I have a feeling this isn't going to work out for me though