Niner

Niner is a three-layer synthesized kick drum plugin with a parallel 909-style clap voice. SUB sine, MID sine+noise, and a band-passed click TOP layer mix into a five-voice distortion palette, a tilt/low/notch master EQ, and a master bus that goes RMS comp — transformer drive — brickwall limiter — auto tube warmth. Ships with a 16-step pattern sequencer, in-plugin MIDI Learn, factory + user presets, one-shot WAV/AIFF bounce, and an interactive standalone editor.

Key features:

• Three-layer kick engine with independent tuning, amp + pitch envelopes, and per-layer drift.
• 909-style CLAP voice — parallel, noise through a 2-pole SVF bandpass, baked 3-burst + exponential tail. Bit-identical bypass when off.
• Five-voice distortion palette — Sat Clip, Sat Diode, Sat Tape, Transformer drive, auto Master warmth.
• Master bus compressor with three macros (Amount, Reaction, Transformer drive) and a precision strip: Attack 0.3–50 ms, Release 20–800 ms, Knee 0–12 dB.
• Master EQ — tilt, low shelf, variable-Q notch.
• 16-step sequencer — host-synced in a DAW, internal transport in standalone.
• In-plugin MIDI Learn — right-click any knob, the BPM display, or the PLAY button to bind a MIDI CC or NoteOn. Bindings persist across DAW project save/load and standalone session restarts. Three CC encodings auto-detected at bind time (Absolute, BinaryOffset, Centered) cover BeatStep, BCR2000, FaderFox, Pioneer, and X-Touch out of the box, with a manual override picker on the right-click menu for edge cases.
• Sample-accurate MIDI NoteOn dispatch — under JACK and DAW hosts, each NoteOn schedules at its real frame offset inside the current audio buffer instead of collapsing to sample 0 of the next process call. Tight pad rolls keep their micro-timing all the way to the audio output.
• One-shot bounce — renders the current sound through the full chain to 16-bit / 44.1 kHz WAV or AIFF, against a fresh DSP instance. Bit-for-bit reproducible. Live audio keeps flowing during the render.
• Forward-compatible JSON presets — future versions don't break your saves.

What's deliberately missing:

• AU. The framework (nih-plug) doesn't ship AU. Logic Pro users will have to wait for the JUCE-based paid line. Reaper, Bitwig, Live, Cubase, Studio One, FL, Renoise, and Ardour on Mac all work via VST3 or CLAP.
• Polyphony. It's a kick drum.
• Continuous window resizing — the editor offers three fixed scale steps (1× / 1.5× / 2×) rather than free drag-to-resize.
• UI scaling that holds up in the host — 1× / 1.5× / 2×, applied live inside the plugin window, not just the standalone. Earlier builds only scaled the standalone; 1.0 fixes the in-host path with a small egui-baseview fork that respects egui's zoom factor (pinned via Cargo [patch]). Layout, rendering, and mouse-hit testing all scale together, and text re-rasterises at the target scale so it stays sharp rather than upscaled.

Free. GPL-3.0-or-later. Source on GitHub. VST3 + CLAP + Standalone on Linux, macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), and Windows. Devlog and downloads at hyperfocusdsp.com.