4. Changelog

What has changed in each release, in plain terms — newest first. Because the plugin never connects to the internet, it can't tell you when a new version is out; open Settings → About → Check for updates to reach this page, and compare the top entry here with the version shown on the About tab.

If you use the plugin through your DAW, updating is simply a matter of installing the newer version over the old one — your saved presets and any sessions you have made are preserved.

Unreleased

In the Audio In panel, Attack and Release no longer grey out while Trigger is on with Amount at zero. They still set when a hit fires, so they now look as live as they are.
A damaged preset or saved session with an unreadable setting now loads that setting at its default instead of dropping it to zero.
A damaged preset, saved session or pasted patch now loads with any broken setting back at its normal starting value, so a string's fine-tuning can no longer show as garbage on its peg, and cancelling Set all to… in the Tune panel no longer puts the broken value back.
Closing the plugin window or a panel while dragging a control no longer leaves your DAW stuck recording automation for it. On a touch screen, a second finger on a knob no longer interrupts or ends the drag of the first.
Uninstalling on Windows is now safer. The uninstaller removes only the plugin's own files and never follows a shortcut-style link out of its folders, and the installer stops other people who use the same computer from changing the shared factory presets.
Saving a user preset with characters a filename can't hold (such as / or :) now saves it under a tidied name instead, and the preset always lands in your user preset folder.
On a Mac, the plugin now looks for its factory presets in /Library/Application Support/Daihamu/Aeolian Wind Drone/Presets/Factory, the standard place for shared files on macOS. The User Guide now explains where to copy the plugin and the presets from the macOS and Linux downloads. If you had copied the factory presets into /Library/Daihamu by hand, move them to the new folder.
The picture of the incoming sound in the Audio In panel now has a second, pale line showing the incoming sound as Attack and Release smooth it. A hit fires when that pale line rises to the red threshold line, so you can see why a hit did or did not count.
A new Animate wind and strings switch on the Display tab in Settings keeps the harp picture still: the strings rest straight without their sounding glow and the wind disappears, while everything still follows your knobs. Handy on a slower computer, when recording your screen, or if the movement is distracting.
The strings on the harp now keep moving after you switch presets. Before, every other preset you loaded could leave them standing still even though the harp was still sounding.
Moving the reverb and delay controls while the harp is playing no longer causes crackles, clicks or squeals. Mix, Feedback, Ping-Pong, ducking, Mod, Pre-Delay, Size and High Cut now change smoothly, and freezing either effect fades in and out instead of cutting in. Changing the delay's Time or Division now bends the echoes in pitch like a tape machine changing speed, never playing them backwards, so a big change takes a few seconds to arrive rather than a fraction of a second. Factory presets sound exactly as before.
The values on the FX strip now light up like old lamp-lit meters when the input or an effect is switched on, and a small bakelite pointer on a scale along each one shows at a glance how far its level or mix is turned up, its line glowing while it is on. The input's scale is marked in decibels.
The draggable FX displays are easier to use: the pointer turns into a two-way arrow over anything you can grab, a label names the setting you are dragging, handles no longer sit on top of each other, the reverb's Pre-Delay drags finely, the delay's Feedback can be grabbed even at zero, and an echo dragged past the edge waits there with a small arrow instead of vanishing.
The FX displays are now draggable: shape the delay's echoes and the reverb's tail directly on the picture, and the rotaries follow. Double-click to reset, Shift for fine adjustment.
The audio input panel is tidier and narrower: its input controls now sit in two rows, and the panel title and group names are lettered like the rest of the instrument and the reverb and delay panels.
The option knobs -- Material, Pan Layout, the reverb's Character, the delay's Division and the input panel's Route, Target and Action -- no longer just step to the next choice when clicked. Click a name around the knob to jump straight to it, or click the knob itself (or press Enter) for a list of every choice. All seven now look and work the same way.
The FX strip has been redesigned: the input, reverb and delay each get the same red lever switch as Pairing, you can drag their readouts left or right to set the input level or effect mix, a small faders button opens each one's full controls, and the effects-order button now shows an icon.
The Turbulence control now stirs the wind more like real gusty air: alongside the quick flutter there are slower drifts, so strings wander in and out of song a little more naturally, while the overall amount of turbulence stays the same. Factory presets that use Turbulence sound a little more alive. Solar Flare's gust swells have been eased slightly so it keeps its steady glare.
Muting a string while it is gliding to a new pitch no longer leaves it dying away too quickly (or ringing too long) once it sounds again; it now decays just as a string set to that pitch would.
Strings no longer ring on a little longer than they should once the wind drops or after a pluck. The difference is barely there on Gut and Nylon and small on most Metal settings, but thick, short Metal strings tuned high now die away noticeably sooner, as the Damp setting intends. While the wind is blowing, the factory presets sound as before.
Switching the Material from Metal to Gut or Nylon no longer leaves the strings out of tune. Before, they could stay sharp (badly so on thick, short strings) until another setting was changed.
Metal strings now have a richer, more piano-like ring: their higher overtones sit progressively further apart the higher they go, the way a real steel string's do, most noticeably on thick, short strings. The factory presets that use Metal keep their character and level, with a slightly more bell-like shimmer in their upper overtones. Gut and Nylon sound exactly as before.
Strings now ring out more like real strings: as a note dies away after a pluck or when the wind drops, its bright upper overtones fade faster than the note itself, so the tail mellows as it fades. At the darkest Bright settings the highest strings also ring out a little sooner. While the wind is blowing, the factory presets sound essentially as before.
The delay's echo timeline now comes alive while you play: you can watch the actual sound bounce from one echo to the next, fading as it goes, with a small meter showing how loud the echoes really are.
The reverb's picture now lights up with your sound: each gust glows in after the pre-delay, drifts along the tail and fades out just where the reverb goes quiet, the top half following the left channel and the bottom half the right. It stays dark whenever the reverb is silent, and Freeze holds the glow in place.
A new Display tab in Settings has an Animate FX displays switch. Turn it off and the reverb and delay pictures in the FX panel hold still instead of moving, which helps on a slower computer, when recording your screen, or if the motion is distracting.
The delay's panel now shows its echoes as a timeline: each repeat is a bar standing where you will hear it and as loud as it will sound, and every delay control -- timing, feedback, ping-pong, offset, damping, low cut, ducking, mod and mix -- visibly changes the picture.
The Reverb's display now draws the shape of its tail: the gap before it starts, the first reflections, how long it takes to fade away and how wide it spreads, following the controls as you turn them. With Freeze on, the tail is drawn holding level.
Each effect's panel now opens on a small display window above its controls, where the effect will draw a picture of what it does to your sound. It dims while the effect is off, and in Help mode hovering it explains what it shows.
Greyed-out buttons and controls now have easier-to-read labels.
The Delete button is now greyed out while a factory preset is selected, instead of looking clickable and then showing a Cannot Delete message.
The preset bar, the FX strip and the NOTES and TUNE buttons now match the console look of the rest of the panel: raised keys, domed brass buttons and a dark-glass display for the preset name.
The Reverb and Delay panels have a clearer, console-style title. Their Character and Division dials now match the Material and Pan Layout knobs: the option names are stamped around the top of the dial, and the three name plates on the top row sit in one line. To fit, the Character dial shortens Chamber and Ambience to CHMBR and AMB.
Panel names are now printed in clear, console-style lettering, and every panel of knobs is the same height.
The plugin window is a little shorter: the empty strip under the Voice and Stereo + Output knobs is gone, and the harp is the same size as before.
The Material and Pan Layout selectors now sit at the right-hand end of their panels, with their name plates level with the knobs beside them. Their option names are stamped in capitals around the top of the knob, so nothing hangs below it.
The window in the front of the soundbox, where you see the strings, is now a clean rounded opening instead of a torn, jagged hole, and you can see the thickness of the wood along its left and bottom edges.
Every knob, dial and switch is now named on a small aged brass nameplate, with larger stamped lettering that is easier to read. The top edge of each plate warms with the glow of the control above it, so you can see at a glance which switches are on.
Hover tips in the Settings window now show up, and the MIDI tab's remaining controls have them.
The preset All A# is now called Throat Singing, a name that describes what you hear rather than how it is tuned. The notes below about its re-voicing use the new name. On Mac or Linux, if you copy the new presets over your old folder, delete All A#.xml from it so the preset is not listed twice.
If you had changed the string gauge ranges in Settings yourself, those values are not carried over -- everything starts from the standard gauges, so your presets may sound a little thinner than you remember. Set the new Gauge control where you want it and save.
A new Gauge control on the Voice panel lets you make the whole set of strings thicker or thinner -- thicker reads darker and rings longer, thinner is brighter and quicker. It is saved with each preset. String gauge is no longer set in Settings, which now has just the MIDI and About tabs.
Presets in the factory list no longer appear split across repeated group headings — each group is listed once, in a stable order.
Three new factory presets under Dark & Breathing. Eerie Strings: a sparse, clashing chord that rises out of silence into a wide wash of reverb and echoes -- one of the quietest sounds in the box, so give it some gain. Cathedral Breath: a cathedral drone that breathes, swelling slowly and sinking almost to silence on a perfectly smooth wind. Obsidian Undertow: a near-mono sub-bass that surges and falls away -- best on speakers or headphones that reach low.
The faint hiss that sat over the harp at medium and high Wind is gone. The wind's push was leaking out well above the notes the strings were actually sounding, and it now stays in their own register. Nothing is retuned, but the windiest, busiest presets are a little quieter and cleaner for losing it -- Thunderstorm, Mountain Gale and Storm Approaching most of all. Throat Singing changes the most: the thin band that used to sit above its low unison was part of the leak, so it is now a darker, purer drone. The glassy presets shift furthest the other way -- Glass Pavilion, Tidal Glass and Gamelan Ghost carried most of their weight below the strings as leak rather than note, so they are cleaner and clearer now but distinctly lighter underneath than you will remember them.
The audio input now has its own controls on the front panel. An IN lamp and value sit at the left of the FX strip; clicking the value opens a panel with everything in one place, including a scrolling picture of the incoming sound and a threshold line you can drag to set how loud a hit has to be to play the harp.
The harp can now play along with what you feed it. Switch Audio In Trigger On and every hit in the incoming audio -- a drum, a clap, a tap on the desk -- either plucks a string or pushes a gust of wind through the harp, whichever you pick. Louder hits answer harder, successive hits walk along the strings rather than landing on the same one, and muting a string keeps hits off it.
Three presets — Solar Flare, Squall Line and Storm Approaching — have been re-voiced. Each had slowly thinned out at the top over successive releases, drifting away from the sound its name promises. They have their air back. Solar Flare is also a little louder and less piercing than before, and Squall Line and Storm Approaching are brighter and tighter.
Audio fed into the plugin can now drive the harp itself: turn Audio In Env Amount up and the wind rises and falls with whatever you play in, so the harp gusts in time with it. Point it at Gust, Turbulence, Brightness, Body or Sympathy instead if you prefer, and set how fast it reacts with Attack and Release.
The harp can now be played by what you feed it. With audio routed into the plugin and Audio In switched on, the Route setting decides what happens to it: Strings feeds it into the twelve strings the way the wind is fed in, so they ring in sympathy with it through your own tuning, materials, mutes and body -- a voice, a drum loop or a whole mix played through your harp rather than through a filter. Body plays it through the hollow box instead, for the cabinet colour without the pitching. You do not need Audio In Direct up to hear either of them, and the wind does not have to be blowing: turn Wind right down and the strings live entirely off what you play in. Changing preset mid-take no longer interrupts it -- the resonance crosses over to the new patch without a gap.
The harp can now be played by sound as well as by wind: your DAW can feed audio into the plugin -- a voice, a guitar, a whole mix -- and blend it in with the drone, through the same reverb and delay. It stays silent until you both route audio in and switch it on, so nothing you have already saved sounds any different. There are no dials for it on the panel yet; for now it is reached from your DAW's own list of the plugin's controls. Bypassing the plugin passes routed-in audio straight through instead of going silent, once you have switched Audio In on.
New factory preset: Far Shore -- a drone heard from a long way off across open ground: wide, dark and unbroken, with its echoes already blurred into the wash rather than arriving as separate repeats. It is the first preset to run the effects the new way round, reverb before delay, so there is now something in the box that shows what that ordering is for.
You can now set the order the effects run in. The FX button opens a new FX chain view showing the sound's path from IN to OUT, one block per effect; drag a block, or use the arrows on it, to reorder them. Delay before Reverb -- the way it starts, and the way every saved patch stays -- sends each repeat into the room; Reverb before Delay echoes the whole wash instead. Each block also carries the effect's on/off lamp, and clicking one opens that effect's controls.
Each effect now opens its own panel. Clicking the reverb or delay value on the FX strip opens just that effect's controls, instead of one panel holding both -- and Tab now moves through that effect's controls in order rather than jumping between the two.
Three new presets use the new reverb and delay: Stone Nave, a slow drone in a large cold stone room; Night Pulse, where a tempo-synced delay turns the drone into a dark, ducking pulse; and Glass Plate, bright glassy strings through a plate reverb and a long free-running echo. Everything you had saved already sounds exactly as it did -- the effects stay switched off unless a preset asks for them.
Pushing the reverb and delay hard no longer breaks up. With the delay's Mix and Feedback both near the top -- especially with Damp all the way down -- the effects could add up to more signal than the output could carry, and the result was a harsh crackle over the top of everything. Loud stretches are now eased down smoothly instead.
Turning a knob now takes effect straight away. Wind, Bright, Damp, Body and the rest used to drift towards a new setting over several seconds -- and how long they took depended on your DAW's buffer size, so the same move felt different in different hosts. They now arrive in a hundredth of a second, everywhere.
Reverb and delay are now on the front panel. A new FX strip below the Wind row shows both at a glance — a lamp for each, and its current setting beside it — with the lamps switching an effect in or out where they sit. Clicking a setting, or the FX button beside them, opens the full FX panel: two columns of controls for the room, its tail and its tone, and for the repeats, their timing and how far they bounce across the stereo field. Both effects start switched off, so nothing you have already saved sounds any different until you reach for them, and each starts with a modest amount mixed in, so switching one on is heard straight away.
Loading a preset now resets every setting the preset does not mention back to its normal value, instead of leaving whatever the previous preset had set. Glide Time was the one you could hear: it used to follow you from patch to patch. Import settings works the same way now: a setting missing from the pasted text returns to its normal value rather than keeping yours, so an imported patch sounds the same for whoever pastes it. A setting the text does mention but garbles is still left alone, as before.
In strong wind the strings are driven on their own notes again, instead of a fraction of the way toward the wind's own whistle — the drone keeps its body and the faint out-of-tune haze above it is gone.
Tidal Glass, Glass Pavilion, Mountain Gale, Thunderstorm and Solitary Strings have been retuned to keep the bright, airy character their names promise — the wind fix above shifts register slightly at high wind, and shortening the strings brings it back. Sessions you have already saved are unaffected, but a saved copy of one of these presets will show as modified; re-select it if you want the new voicing.
Throat Singing has been re-voiced as well, in a different direction: the twelve-string unison now sounds on its own low A#, with the body and the sympathetic ring brought up behind it, instead of the thinner band that used to sit above it. A saved copy will show as modified in the same way; re-select it for the new voicing.
New factory preset: Storm Cellar — a gale heard through the floor: all the weight of a strong wind, none of the bright hiss above it. The first preset to pair high Wind with a deep register; until now, turning Wind up always meant climbing into the storm's usual bright top end.

Version 1.1.0

Factory preset levels are more consistent: the loudest presets no longer jump out when you switch between them, and several quiet ones have been brought up. Sessions you have already saved are unaffected — they reopen sounding exactly as you left them — but the preset name will show as modified, because the preset on disk has moved since you saved. Re-select the preset if you want its new level.
Wind Chord no longer sours at the top of the range. Holding a chord above B5 with paired courses on used to put every course a beating major 7th apart instead of a clean octave, and the Spread voicing stacked half the harp onto one note at the very top — its harshest register — whenever a single note was held. High notes now sound on the course's partner string, and Spread wraps its fan back round to spread evenly over the range it has. The 12-string guitar layout's two unison courses keep the full range, so a high note sounds where you played it rather than an octave down.
A chord change no longer lands on all twelve strings in the same instant — they arrive scattered across a Wind shift spread you can set (or turn off) in Settings → MIDI, so the harp shifts like wind rather than switching over.
Plucks now land exactly where you played them. A note struck part-way through one of the audio host's buffers used to be snapped back to the start of it — up to about 10 ms of jitter, enough to sound sloppy on anything rhythmic and to collapse two quick plucks into a single hit. That now holds everywhere in Pluck mode, including Retune it to your note: the moment a string is pulled onto a new note, the pitch change and the pluck happen together on the sample you played, so a melodic line stays in time instead of being snapped to the buffer on every new pitch. Wind Chord and String Gate are unchanged: on a drone that much movement is inaudible.
Plucking a string to your note no longer drags the drone onto what you played — a retuned string now drifts back to the preset's tuning after a few seconds, with a new Return after setting (and Hold, if you liked it the old way).
Wind Chord now keeps the voicing you played. Holding a single note used to collapse all twelve strings onto that one pitch, and the Spread voicing threw your octaves away entirely — C2-E3-G4 and C5-E5-G5 came out identical. The new default, As played, keeps the octaves you played and doubles them outward so even one held note fills the harp's range. Direct and Spread are still there in Settings - MIDI; saved sessions keep whatever they were set to.
String Gate now breathes. Opening a string used to take hundreds of milliseconds while letting go cut it dead mid-ring; strings now fade in under your finger (30 ms by default) and settle away when you release (400 ms), with both times adjustable in Settings - MIDI. A closing string keeps stirring its neighbours all the way down, and a released string keeps its ring, so re-opening it sounds straight away. Letting go now hushes a string by default rather than silencing it outright.
Sliding the pitch by hand no longer drags it behind you. Sweeping the pitch wheel, or dragging a tuning peg, left the strings trailing your hand and only arriving once you stopped moving — unusable at the longer Glide Time settings. Both now follow. Anything that genuinely jumps — a note change, Randomise, a single bend message — still glides as before.
Retuning a string while it is sounding now slides to the new pitch instead of clicking — turning a peg, Randomise/Reset Notes, automation and the MIDI note modes all glide. Preset loads still land instantly. The glide length is a new automatable Glide Time parameter (0.25 s by default; set it to 0 for the old behaviour).
New factory preset: Cavern Floor — a deep, wide, unbroken drone sitting at the bottom of the instrument's range. The first sub-register preset that is also present and wide rather than faint and narrow.
Night Choir, Microtonal Dusk and Aurora Veil have their low end back. The dark presets had drifted up into a thin, hollow register with almost nothing underneath them — Night Choir in particular is a choir with its bass section returned, and Aurora Veil now holds as an unbroken pad instead of breaking up every few seconds.
Every knob, switch and button on the main panel can now be reached and operated from the keyboard: Tab follows the panel's reading order, arrow keys nudge the knobs, and Space flips the switches. Tab no longer skips Bright, Damp and Length. The harp canvas strings and the preset list itself are still mouse-only.
Strings no longer blink between two tones in steady wind — the vortex model now holds its lock-in instead of switching harmonics on every audio block.
The top of the Wind range no longer thins out into a harsh, hissy top end — strong wind now reads as more force and more weather in the instrument's own register. Wind Organ, Glass Pavilion and Solar Flare in particular have lost a hard 2 kHz edge, and the body underneath it is audible again.
Past about two-thirds of its travel, the Wind knob stops climbing in pitch and starts adding weight instead: below that point it still lifts the sound from a hum into the singing range, above it the instrument simply gets stronger and gustier. Reach for Bright when you want brighter rather than stronger.
A gentle fixed output tilt takes the last edge off the top octaves without dulling the body.
The MIDI performance modes now explain themselves. Off, Wind Chord, String Gate and Pluck are picked from four lit cards in Settings → MIDI instead of a dropdown under a When you play a note heading, and beneath them a moving diagram plays the selected mode out — wind over the twelve strings, the keys pressing themselves — with a plain sentence describing what your keys will do. Every option beneath is worded by what you will hear (Latch — the chord stays rather than Latch (keep the chord)), and what is true in every mode — the gust pads and the panel-action trigger notes, now named by note number so you can find them — is stated on screen instead of hiding in a tooltip. The MIDI tab scrolls, so nothing is cut off at the bottom. See Playing notes — performance modes in Section 2.
Reporting a bug no longer needs a GitHub account. Settings → About → Report a bug now opens a short form on our own site instead of the GitHub tracker: no account, no sign-in, and it reaches us by email. Paste the Copy diagnostics block into it and your version, system, host and audio settings come along automatically. The public tracker is still there for browsing known issues and voting on requests — it is just no longer the front door.
MIDI control. Perform the wind live from a controller: MIDI-learn any CC to the wind, tone, body and mix controls (defaults: mod wheel and breath → Wind Strength, expression → Volume), channel aftertouch → Wind Turbulence, pitch bend leans the whole harp's tuning (configurable range), and Program Change switches presets over the gapless crossfade (Bank Select picks Factory vs User presets). Set it up in the new Settings → MIDI tab; mappings save with the DAW session. See MIDI Control in Section 2.
MIDI note performance. Play the harp from a keyboard: Wind Chord (held chords retune the strings), String Gate (notes fade strings open and closed, with velocity setting how loudly), and Pluck (notes strike a string with a velocity-scaled burst that blooms out of the drone — nearest-string or retune-then-pluck, with a selectable velocity curve). Low notes (MIDI 5–23) are gust pads that fire velocity-scaled wind swells in any mode, held at peak under the sustain pedal. See Playing notes — performance modes in Section 2.
MIDI output. The harp can generate MIDI as well as receive it: seven independently-enabled lanes (all off by default) turn wind-note gate edges, wind/gust/turbulence telemetry, poly aftertouch, gust-crest triggers, and tuning-echo chords into Note/CC/aftertouch messages your DAW can record — CC 20/21/22 for wind speed/gust/turbulence (deliberately clear of the CC 11 input default, so routing output back into input can't feed back into Volume), MIDI note 96 for gust crests. Set it up in Settings → MIDI → OUTPUT; the lane enables save with the DAW session. See MIDI Output in Section 2.

Version 1.0.1

The first public release of Aeolian Wind Drone — a twelve-string aeolian harp you play by setting the wind.

Twelve physically modelled strings, arranged in paired courses, sung entirely by a living wind simulation.
A wind you can shape — strength, turbulence, gust depth, and breath — plus tone shapers (Bright, Damp, Length), sympathetic resonance, a modelled soundbox, stereo width and pan layouts.
Per-string control over note, fine tuning in cents, mute, and ghost-mute, with the harp canvas as a live tuning interface.
A curated bank of factory presets, plus your own saved presets, and preset sharing by file or clipboard.
Settings → About gains Check for updates and Report a bug links, alongside the existing Documentation link and the Copy diagnostics / Import settings support tools.
A resizable interface (75%–300%) that remembers its size.