April Fools’ Day Announcements Roundup 2016

April 1st is here, so don’t trust anyone. Don’t even trust your favorite plugin developer, nor the company that made your most precious hardware synth. They’re all out there to fool us! One thing is for certain, though. BPB can’t be fooled no matter how hard they try, so we decided to hit back by compiling a list of the most entertaining fake product announcements on this page.

Rhythmic Robot has launched Silencio (pictured at the top of this page), a free Native Instruments Kontakt library with a professional 24-bit silence engine. It features analog and digital silence types, and is particularly well optimized for a low CPU hit and surprisingly small memory footprint. According to the press release, the product is ideal for playing John Cage’s 4’33. An audio preview is available on the official product page.

BozDigitalLabs has launched a new service called Pedra. They will edit your music by hand, sample by sample (literally, zoomed to 100% in the audio editor), transforming it into a timeless piece of art that will last longer than your house. Don’t ask them about the price because they find it offensive. I think we have a winner.

Wavesfactory has released Phi, a freeware VST/AU plugin which applies the Divine Proportion to your music. Feed any audio signal to it and the plugin will automatically rearrange the incoming data in order to fit the Golden Ratio of 1.618. If you’re feeling particularly savvy today, you can feed your latest demo project to it in order to save on mastering costs. Or, process your vocals with it, in case you can’t afford to bring Adele to the studio today. An AAX version is expected for release soon.

Xtant Audio pushes the boundaries of NI Kontakt soundware with a library that is too epic to describe. The project was obviously the work of a megalomaniac, because it involved the London Orchestra, the mountains of Tibet, millions of samples and 32-bit/96 kHz quality.

EDMProd is inviting everyone to join the Elevener beta testing program. Elevener is still a work in progress, obviously, but the concept is quite clear. This effect will make it possible to go louder than 0 dBFS, which is essentially a dream come true for all mastering engineers. Especially the old school mastering cats. Many thanks to our reader Dee.P.Tree for the tip!

Robotic Bean AB released MC-1 More Cowbell for Propellerhead Reason. Nothing else to add here, the name says it all. Thanks to Navi Retlav for the tip!

midierror has announced that he discovered a secret SysEX message which turns the Arturia MiniBrute into a 3-note polyphonic synthesizer. Proof below.

Tom Cosm has released a free Black Noise sample pack. Not white, not pink, not even brown. Hear it below and download for free using the coupon code BLACKNOISE100.

That’s all for now. We’ll add more announcements here as they pop up.

But before you go, let’s quickly mention one of the most successful April Fools’ announcements ever. Back in 2004, when the VST format was still somewhat of a novelty, this freebie by Smart Electronics (suspiciously released on April 1st) puzzled many of its users. But it did (and still does) exactly what it said on the tin – emulating an anechoic room couldn’t be done better in a million years.