What shipped in 0.5, modulators, stems, the long edit

v0.5 shipped on June 8 after the longest development cycle we’ve had. It’s the first build that feels like it deserves the word “instrument” without the word “early”.

Here’s what’s new and why each thing matters.

Modulators

You can now right-click any knob and pick “Modulate this”. A modulator slot opens, LFO, envelope, random, or macro, and the knob starts moving. Per-route smoothing so you can dial in how quickly the modulation responds.

This is the Bitwig convention, and we copied it because it works. You don’t open a modulation matrix; you don’t wire a source to a destination; you don’t think about routing. You click the parameter you want to move, you pick the shape, you’re done.

The macros are the most interesting. One macro slider can be bound to fifteen parameters across five plugins, each with its own per-route depth and curve. Sweep the macro and the whole rig moves.

WSOLA pitch-shift

Every loop on a sampler or slicer track can now be pitched without changing the sample rate. We use WSOLA: a time-domain algorithm that preserves transients. Play a 124 BPM loop at 132 BPM without it sounding like a chipmunk. Pitch each slice of a chopped sample independently. The transients stay sharp.

What took a year was matching it across slices. If you pitch slice 3 of a sample by +2 semitones and slice 4 by -1, the boundary between them used to click. The 0.5 implementation crossfades the boundary at sub-buffer resolution. It doesn’t click any more.

Stem separation

Note, 2026-08-25. What ships today is the four-stem schema and per-stem levels on a deck, drums, bass, vocals, other. There is no separation model in the current codebase. This entry is left as it was written. Treat the adapter described below as a thing of its moment rather than a current capability.

The Drums / Bass / Vox / Other schema for stems landed in 0.5. The HTDemucs real-time adapter is wired and verified. Drop a recorded track on a long-sample track, and the engine spawns a background process that separates it into four stems, caches the results, and exposes the stems as four mute-able sub-tracks.

This isn’t on the level of Traktor’s stem feature, yet. The separation quality is genuinely good but the processing is offline, not real-time. Drop a track, give it 20 seconds, get four stems. For DJ use you’d pre-process before the gig. For hybrid live + recorded sets, that’s exactly the workflow.

Per-scene tempo ramp

Set a target BPM on a scene and pick a ramp time in bars. The engine interpolates the tempo from the current value to the target over the ramp. The math is in the audio thread so it doesn’t drift.

Hands-free risers and slowdowns are made of this. Mark a scene “ramp from 128 to 142 over 16 bars”. Fire it. Take your hands off the tempo knob for sixteen bars while the room builds.

The four-persona polish pass

The biggest UX work in 0.5 was invisible: we redid the entire interface to support four distinct user personas. DJ-leaning, producer-DJ hybrid, hardware-anchored, amateur-laptop. The first time you open the app, a three-step onboarding sequence picks the right one based on how you opened it (drag in samples? hybrid. plug in a controller? hardware. open a template? DJ. fresh start with nothing? amateur).

The persona changes the default panel layout, the visible tools, the coach marks, and the first-run tutorial. Once you’ve used the app for a week the differences mostly disappear, but the first hour is dramatically less overwhelming, regardless of what you came from.

What else landed

Standard MIDI File export. Cross-slot Performance tiles. 54 new display-free invariant tests in CI (boring but necessary, they catch silent LED drift and mix regressions before they reach you). Coach marks across all four personas. The credibility list on the home page now has every bullet verified.

What’s next

v0.6 is in development. The headline feature is a paint-style layout designer, design your peak-time grid in a visual editor instead of by editing a config file. The public trial build lands alongside it. If you’ve been waiting for that, the wait is measured in weeks.

If you want a beta licence in the meantime, you know where to email.