One Battle After Another (Week 2)

Welcome back to our month-long celebration of Battalion! Let's get right into it, as this week is a big one.

We are very excited to announce the immediate release of our first truly free Unfiltered Audio plugin: BattleFX!

BattleFX extracts the entire effects chain from Battalion, including Shatter Delay, Headspace Reverb, the 3-band EQ, the maximizer, and more! Read on to learn more, or just grab a free copy and dive right in: https://www.unfilteredaudio.com/products/battlefx

The first thing you'll notice is our new license system. When you complete the free checkout, you'll receive an email from licenses.unfilteredaudio.com (If it ends up in spam, please add it to your approved senders list... we're a small company and this helps to verify us with the email services!). We're going to transition all products over to this new email system, as Sendowl raised our monthly price by 2,000% this year. Yes, two thousand--not an extra zero there.

After that, you'll see our new license portal. We've gone with a very simple system here. Each license can be activated on three machines simultaneously. If you get a new computer, no need to email us. You can deactivate machines directly from the portal. It's not obvious or visible yet, but this new portal also gives us the ability to deliver builds very quickly. You'll have access to *every* previous build, along with public betas all in one spot. No more chasing down our forum posts or public beta page to find out what we're up to. You can also optionally subscribe to email alerts for when we push major versions. This is separate from our newsletter.

I know, that's two paragraphs waxing poetic on the license system, but as a small business owner that has dealt with a lot of uncertainty this year (and the outright abusive behavior like Sendowl mentioned above), every bit of infrastructure that we own is enormous for our two person team. Now, on to the fun stuff.

BattleFX! We've had a lot of requests from people who take advantage of Battalion's multi-out system. As you might know, Battalion's effect system is only applied to the main outputs. You can still send non-main drums to the effects, but the effects show up only on the main outputs. BattleFX solves this by giving you the effects anywhere you want them, including on other instruments. I've personally had a lot of fun placing this on a sampled Rhodes, piano, acoustic drums, guitar, even non-Battalion synthetic drums (blasphemy!).

Josh added the coolest feature to this one. Since BattleFX doesn't have a sequencer like Battalion, he added a Euclidean choking system to the effects. I made a few factory presets to show this off, but it's one that you'll want to tweak endlessly to match your material. I've had great outcomes with putting sparser chokes on the reverbs (i.e. choke every 2-4 bars), which gives these long, slow blooms that suddenly cut. Likewise, tight delay times with rapid chokes create Karplussy buzzes, flams, ruffs, digital glitches, and other gestures that really grab my attention.

Overall, I've been very surprised at how quickly this plugin became my go-to on just about everything. I'm hoping that this becomes a standard free plugin recommendation, like a woolier, more aggressive buddy to Valhalla Supermassive. We look forward to hearing what you make with it!

Finally, as a follow-up to last week's post, the final builds of Battalion for VCV Rack are now in VCV's hands and should be released early next week. I'm feeling rested after a nice vacation in the desert last weekend, and I'm still catching up on all of the wild Superbooth announcements. Perhaps we'll talk more about that next week!

Stay tuned,
Michael

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P.S. It was important to both of us to release this as a gift to the community, as we are continually thankful for the enthusiasm, warmth, and noise you have shown to us over the years. You would probably laugh in slight annoyance at how often we have talked about doing more free plugins (and how many we have started but not actually released!). That makes today's launch even sweeter. Please enjoy it and send it to friends. Sincere thanks for remaining Unfiltered. -Josh