Audio Damage has announced the immediate availability of its latest plugin for Windows, Mac and Linux.

An architecturally unique and sonically characterful looping toolkit for producers and live performers, inspired by both modern looper pedals and vintage tape-based setups, Enso combines elegant and intuitive UI design with a deep but accessible feature set and stellar sound quality.

Enso’s operation will be immediately familiar to users of hardware looper pedals or plugins such as Ableton Live’s bundled Looper. Start playback of the host DAW, hit Enso’s record button and capture your instrumental performance into a loop of whatever length you like, up to ten minutes (five minutes on iOS). Then, without stopping playback, overdub further passes to create layered grooves, complex harmonic textures, or dense, evolving soundscapes.

Beyond those basics, though, Enso takes software looping into new territory. Two Overdub modes configure the plugin for conventional looper pedal behavior or Frippertronics-style ‘dual tape deck’ manoeuvres, affecting the handling of the Feedback parameter for an endless range of layering possibilities; and up to four Sectors can be effortlessly defined, each with its own start and end points, for on-the-fly rearrangement of the loop.

With Enso, time and motion become truly fluid, as speed and direction are handled completely independently for playback and recording, the ‘through-zero’ bipolar Speed controls smoothly transitioning from forwards to backwards, and vice versa, in real time. Want to record forwards at half speed, while simultaneously playing the buffered loop in reverse at 1.25x? Of course you do…

Onboard tape-style saturation, filtering and chorus effects bring dirt, frequency-shaping and stereo thickening to the party; and a comprehensive MIDI assignment system makes it a snap to set your MIDI pedal or button controller up for operation of all Enso’s buttons and switches. With its animated play and record heads, meanwhile, the looping waveform display provides a clean, clear visual representation of the potentially mind-bending temporal acrobatics taking place, letting you get a handle on exactly what’s happening at a glance.

Giving you everything you need for limitlessly creative looping, on stage and in the studio, Enso is one of Audio Damage’s most beautiful
ly realized plugins yet, and an empowering addition to any musician’s arsenal of effects

ENSO CHANGES
V1.0.15
>> Much smooth. Very declicking. Wow. We have done a lot of work to minimize edge- and corner-case clicking, principally in the Sectors. You will find that, in general, the Sector features work much better, and there will be no (or minimal, in the case of legato source material) clicks when resizing and moving sectors while playback is occuring.
>> Settings were not recalled correctly when restoring a session in some hosts. This has been fixed.
>> MIDI notes added as sources in the CC Control section. You can now assign a MIDI note to a momentary button the same way you would a controller button.
>> In all quantization modes, the playback and record speed controls now go _towards_ zero when clicking or dragging down, and _away_ from zero when clicking or dragging up. There were some differences of opinion with respect to the various speed quantizations, and this has been remedied.
>> The main mode quantization now affects every momentary button except Trigger and Overdub. What this means: sector switching, RTZ, and sector clear will now respect the quantization. So if you have it set to quarter notes, your sector will switch on the beat.
>> A whole heap of small bug fixes, improvements, and optimizations. We tend to write “optimizations” in the changelog to make it look like we did something clever, but in point of fact we, and every other software company on the planet, use “optimizations” to mean “now that we’re not in a dead rush to get this thing out the door so we can make some money and not, you know, go out of business or whatever, we have the luxury of going back and cleaning up this rat’s nest and making it look somewhat presentable.” Stuff like that.
>> Factory presets added back to the iOS version. They somehow got kicked out of bed in the multiple updates that platform needed.
>> macOS preset location moved from Old N’ Busted “Application Support/Audio Damage” to the New Hotness, “~/Music/Audio Damage”. If you have presets stored in the old location, you will need to manually move them to the new one.
>> Ubuntu Linux x64 VST and VST3 added to the desktop payload.

Homepage https://www.audiodamage.com/collections/software/products/ad049-enso