Forgotten and underrated analog synth beasts with their fat, warm, retro sound has been updated to 1.31

Changes since 1.21:

1.31 2017-07-03

• Anti-Aliasing moved inside the oscillator oversample loop. This costs a bit more CPU power when both AA and oversampling (Quality control) are used in combination, but greatly expands the control over the character of the sound.

1.30 Beta 8 2017-06-16

• New Anti-Aliasing feature completely re-factored (re-written from scratch). Try it again for the first time! Removed "EXPERIMENTAL" from AA tool-tip label. Turned AA on for most built-in programs. (As always, old projects and patch/bank files will still load with the sound they originally played with. We never break sounds in the same major version!) Added AA label to built-in background image.
• Copy Protection: Now looks for Poly-Ana.key.txt if Poly-Ana.key is not found, as some email clients append the .txt extension to our attached key files which isn't always visible to the user by default, causing frequent support nightmares. Either form should work now.
• Added an A=440 Hz reference to the Tune parameter display. (Now all you A=432 Hz kooks will know when you've got the magic frequency!) Label is now Cents/Hz.

1.30 Beta 7 2015-10-01

• Custom Skins: Added optional font and background color definitions to for the Tooltips. See XML file in the included skin folder.
• Custom Skins: Added a new, optional mode to the XML Mod Source control definitions, <NoForceCircRelative> which will disable PolyAna's default behavior of always forcing the Mod Dial controls to use the Relative Circular Knob Mode. This helps with our new dial graphic that demos a knob that turns what appears to be a cylindrical mechanical display and may be more suitable for other types of circular controls designers may wish to make for the Mod Sources when set to Dial mode. (Mod Sources as Dropdowns mode is not affected, nor is Linear Knob Mode which is always relative.) Install the included skin folder to demo this new style control.
• Fixed a long standing bug that caused all circular controls with MouseAreas that are off center from the control bitmap's borders to not use the MouseArea center for calculation of circular control angles but rather the bitmap's center. With this fix, knobs controls that are highly off center from the rest of the bitmap that contains them (say to support a long shadow or a knob with a built-in accompanying display above, below or beside it) will now work as you'd expect them to, with the circular mouse movement centering on the MouseArea (which is typically set to be just around the knob portion of the larger graphic).
• Fixed the Options Dialog mistakenly launching when the mouse cursor was dragged over it while adjusting another control that cropped up in 1.30 Beta 6.

1.30 Beta 6 2015-08-18

• Custom Skins: Added optional font and background color definitions to the Parameter Display. Added optional font color definition to the Program Number selector and Program Name edit field (they can have different colors) and their background and border colors (shared between the two controls). Added optional font color definition to the Mod Source selectors when in dropdown mode. Sorry, we looked into customizing font face and sizes too, but it's hard to get consistent results cross-platform, so those are going to stay un-customizeable for now to keep skinning from becoming overly complicated by cross-platform testing.
• Custom Skins: Fixed a problem with drawing lit-from-left keyboards and fixed the lowest C key not shadowing correctly in lit-from-right mode.
• Custom Skins: Prevented a crash bug that was only happening on OSX 32 bit builds intermittently when notes were playing with the editor open. Unfortunately this makes the shadowing not work quite right in OSX 32 bit when the virtual keyboard is played with the mouse (it works fine when played from MIDI input). We'll continue to try to find the cause of this and fix it right, it's a weird one!
• Custom Skins: Fixed Mod dials not using their MouseArea definitions.
• Custom Skins: Fixed Load/Save buttons not using their MouseArea definitions.
• Anti-aliasing somewhat improved but still needs some work. It makes bad sound when one step runs over another step, which happens at extremely high pitches, narrow pulse widths, or when the waveform is very close to square or saw but not quite exactly on them. Use at your own risk. (It shouldn't crash or anything, the only risk is to your ears and that patches incorporating anti-aliasing may change their sound somewhat before the end of this Beta period.
• Fixed crash on OSX when program/bank/MIDI save dialogs were cancelled out of.
• Fixed sample rate dependent parameters like envelope times not updating internal coefficients when sample rate is changed after initial plug-in instantiation (as can happen by rendering to a different sample rate than your host project is set at). Current program now re-loads causing a re-calculation of all internal coefficients after sample rate changes.

1.30 Beta 5 2015-07-29

• Added a helpful error message if a Custom Skin is missing any controls or attempts to place them more than half their height or width outside the background. (We do not want the new Customs Skins feature to be used to remove functionality from our product and future updates may refuse to run at all if your skins are incomplete!)

1.30 Beta 3 2015-07-25

• New <Offset> tag added to <ImgSrc> definitions in the Poly-AnaSkin.xml file. Allows for shifting of all controls using that image without needing to recalculate and edit the positions for every individual control. Great for compensating for different sized control graphics when editing a preexisting skin!
• Images for Load/Save buttons, Voice Display and Program Inc/Dec buttons can now be defined in the skin. Included skin updated to demonstrate this. (Previous method of automatically drawing the old style controls at a given position still works as well. See Poly-AnaSkin.xml file comments for details on switching between these two modes.)

1.30 Beta 2 - 2015-07-19

• Custom Skins added! For detailed instructions and contest info see: http://www.admiralquality.com/products/Poly-Ana/skins.php
• "PROCESS WHILE SETPARAM!" debug message in the Parameter Display removed from production builds. (It was never an indicator of anything wrong, just an internal testing message.)
• Changed short (VST 8 character) parameter name "Sustain" to "Hold" to match panel and avoid confusion with ADSRs' Sustain. Also changed "A1ModSrc" to "A1Src" to avoid confusion with Mod Source Selector (and for Amp 2 as well). And "A1PMAM" to "A1PM/AM" (and for Amp 2 also). (The VST parameter names are also the control identifier codes in the Custom Skin description xml file.)
• By popular demand, made Mod Source dropdown menus the DEFAULT! You can change them back to "annoying" dials in the Options Dialog (click on the product name).
• New virtual keyboard controls when using a Custom Skin. Still a work in progress, there's some slight drawing bugs we're aware of (half-drawn black keys), and we hope to enable glissandi by dragging the mouse across multiple keys in the next update.

1.30 Beta 1 2015-05-09

• Added (currently unlabeled) new Anti-Alias control in the Quality section. WARNING: This feature is half baked! (Please don't tell us it sounds bad in some cases. We know and will return to improving it soon. We just needed the new control in place before moving ahead with our skinning system, coming in the next update. Otherwise people would start building interfaces missing one control!) It will dramatically reduce aliasing frequencies in simple cases but currently produces a "bad noise" when oscillator pitch is too high or pulse width too narrow. Probably best to just leave it turned off for now. We'll get back to it later in the 1.30 Beta, but it's been holding up development on the user skin system so we needed to put this final new parameter in before users started working on skins, even though it's not quite ready for prime time yet. And while you might use that "bad sound" to effect, note that as this is a Beta period, the sound is not guaranteed to stay the same so any patches you make that utilize the new Anti-Aliasing feature may change their sound in later updates to the Beta. (Your old programs that don't use Anti-Aliasing will continue to sound the exactly same as they always have. We never break pre-existing sound in updates, except during Beta periods and even then, only where it involves new features like this one.)
• OSX: Poly-Ana will now attempt to create its settings and key-file folder. The warning message if it can't has also been improved to be more clear about exactly what folder you need to create manually. If you're still getting the warning message, please let us know what host and OSX version you're running, that will help us a lot.
• patch (*.pap) and bank (*.pab) file load now initializes the Hold and new Anti-Aliasing parameters to off, so when loading older patches these settings will reset to how they were before. (Loading old projects and/or .fxp/.fxb programs and banks into the host already does this.)
• Fixed parameter duplicate name FInput-1 to FInput-2. (These are the parameters that set the filter tracking input MIDI channels in the Options Dialog, opened by clicking on the product name.)

1.30 Beta 0 2015-02-18

• Stability bug that would intermittently cause voices to hang, particularly after changing programs while notes are playing should be fixed. Please let us know!
• OSX: Incorrect double slash in Warning Dialog for configuration folder missing corrected. (Does not affect plugin behavior, just a fix to the confusing path that was displayed to the user in the warning message.)

 

I always liked it an the analogue vibe of it's sound. It's nice to see that it has been updated. The gui was a bit much for my eyes, but I see that there alternate skins which is nice to see.@mild pump milk .. Thanks for the info.

 

Last month it was on sale for $49 and I manage to get it on the last day (even made a thread here about the sale)..
With the new skins it looks as it sounds - fantastic
Truly underrated piece of software...
Thank you for the update on this!

 

@superliquidsunshine could you please check your PM box? there must be something seriously wrong with it.

 

I really liked this synth when it came out for some things, It had a real depth to it and more "3d" then a lot of it's contemporaries... it has been awhile... anyone remember when this initially came out? Thanks for reminding me though! I'm with superliquidsunshine in that it's gui was a little much on the eyes, and that was unfortunate, as it sounded great... but you would bug out if you spent too much time with it.. (at least me)... regardless... best to all!

 

wow, just went to their site, Poly-Ana came out in 2005!?! Nuts... time flies...

 

Impressive coding, from the beginning.
I'm less on the "vintage" side.

But ppl searching for "that" analog vibe should test those synths ;) Very "raw" sounding