COLUMN: Sonic Charge announced this week the update to their nifty “organic” virtual synth, Synplant. Version 1.0.1 fixes some minor things, including Cakewalk Sonar support (a problem I experienced, and which held up my review, which will appear here around Labor Day weekend). According to the company, “The version number is 1.0.1 and it will not bring any new features to Synplant but focuses on improving stability and compatibility.”

Improvements include:
Implemented support for the “all notes off midi message”. We have discovered that some hosts (most importantly Cakewalk Sonar) requires this to stop notes from playing. In other words, the hanging note problems in Sonar should have been fixed now.

Improved compatibility with older VST 2.3 hosts, including FXpansion’s RTAS wrapper. VST 2.4 is still the official requirement, simply because we need to put a limit on the extent of our guarantees. However, we will continue doing our best to provide “unofficial support” for as many hosts as we possibly can. In short, we expect this version of Synplant to work well with the RTAS wrapper.

Fixed a rare but serious problem with the GUI freezing up on Mac (never to defrost again, never to come back to life). Turned out to be a bug in Synplant in combination with some unexpected behavior from OS X.

Some minor updates to the internal code libraries that will improve stability in general.

We are also releasing the first new patch package since the release of Synplant last year. The name is Crop of Year One and it is available free to download for all registered Synplant owners.

More information on this very cool virtual synth: http://www.soniccharge.com/ .