Aureate

Gild the orchestra — tape and console saturation glue for strings, brass and layers.

Work in progress. Aureate is pre-1.0 and under active development. Binaries for macOS and Windows are available from the Releases page (currently unsigned — see the release notes); building from source works too. Expect breaking changes until v1.0.0 ships (see Roadmap).

What it is

Aureate is a tape/console saturation "glue" plugin for orchestral material - strings, brass, and layered/bussed tracks that need cohesion and a little analog warmth without sounding like a guitar pedal. It combines a 4x oversampled, character-selectable saturator (Tape/Console/Valve) with tape-transport artefacts (Wow/Flutter, Hiss) and a console-style tilt EQ plus independent HF/LF trim shelves, so a single Warmth knob adds harmonic richness and softens the top end the way tape does, while the rest of the controls let you dial in exactly which flavour of "glue" a section needs.

Features

• Wow/Flutter (0-100%): tape-transport speed instability (slow "wow" + faster "flutter"), off by default.
• Drive (0-24 dB): gain into the saturator. Kept modest by design - Aureate is a glue processor, not a distortion.
• Warmth (0-100%): jointly controls the saturator's asymmetry (single-ended, tape-like character) and a gentle pre-clip high-frequency rolloff (tape bias/self-erasure character).
• Bias (-100% to +100%): additional, independent saturator asymmetry trim on top of Warmth's own contribution.
• Character (Tape / Console / Valve): selects the saturator's transfer-function family - smooth tanh, harder-edged cubic soft-clip, or exponential valve-style saturation.
• Tone (-100% to +100%): a console-style tilt EQ - darker below 0%, brighter above, flat/unity at 0%.
• HF Trim / LF Trim (-6 to +6 dB): independent fixed-frequency shelf trims, in addition to Tone's tilt.
• Hiss (0-100%): shaped tape-hiss noise floor mixed into the wet path, off by default.
• Mix (0-100%): dry/wet blend, delay-compensated so 0% is a sample-accurate passthrough of the input.
• Output (-24 to +24 dB): final trim applied after the dry/wet mix.
• Full latency reporting and host plugin-delay-compensation support (the 4x oversampler plus Wow/Flutter's fixed base delay are the plugin's only sources of latency, both accounted for in getLatencySamples()).
• AU, VST3, and Standalone builds.

See docs/manual.md for the full parameter reference and usage tips.

Signal flow

input -> Wow/Flutter -> Drive
      -> [4x oversampled: Warmth HF-rolloff -> saturator (Character, Warmth+Bias asymmetry)
         -> Tone tilt -> HF/LF Trim -> Hiss]
      -> downsample -> Dry/Wet Mix -> Output trim -> output

See docs/architecture.md for the full diagram, latency-compensation strategy, and real-time-safety notes.

Roadmap

Tracked as GitHub milestones and issues (M1 DSP & tests · M2 presets/state · M3 GUI & a11y · M4 release/signing/v1.0.0). Read them with gh issue list / gh api repos/basilica-audio/aureate/milestones. The current GUI is a functional v0.1 slider editor; a custom vector-drawn LookAndFeel is a later milestone.

Installation

No pre-built binaries are published yet (see the work-in-progress notice above). Once releases begin, installation will follow the standard plugin locations:

macOS

Format	Path
AU (Component)	~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/
VST3	~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/

If Logic Pro doesn't pick up the plugin after installing, force a rescan by resetting the AU cache:

killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar
auval -a

Windows

Format	Path
VST3	C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\

Building from source

Requires JUCE 8.0.14, C++20, and CMake ≥ 3.24. See docs/building.md for full prerequisites and step-by-step build/test commands for macOS and Windows.

cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure

License

Aureate is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPLv3).

This project uses JUCE 8, whose open-source tier is licensed under AGPLv3 (as of JUCE 8; JUCE 7 and earlier used GPLv3), which is why this project is AGPLv3 rather than GPLv3. See docs/adr/0002-agplv3-licensing.md for the full reasoning.

VST is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.

Aureate is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any plugin manufacturer.