Atlas launches Sunday, November 8

By Blind Producers

Atlas, our free and fully accessible synthesizer, releases officially on Sunday, November 8 at 5 pm Eastern. We are marking it with a live launch event on YouTube and AudioPub: Jay Ladder will make presets live, go through every part of the plugin and answer your questions in the chat.

What Atlas is

Atlas is an open-source AU and VST3 synthesizer for macOS and Windows, built on Matt Tytel’s Vital. It keeps Vital’s sound engine and grows it in every direction, and it is fully accessible to screen readers, VoiceOver on macOS and NVDA, JAWS or Narrator on Windows: from adjusting parameters to modulation, LFO and wavetable editing, everything works from the keyboard.

What is inside

  • Eight oscillators, each running one of ten engines: wavetable, analog, sample, granular, spectral, noise, multi-sample for SFZ, Decent Sampler and SF2 libraries, Braids, the OpenWurli electric piano and the Open B3 organ.
  • Two voice filters in series or parallel, with Vital’s models plus wavetable, distortion, reverb, scream, ring modulation and sample and hold filters.
  • Over 40 effects across a main chain and three buses, with a routing matrix and latency compensation.
  • Twelve LFOs with a curve editor you edit from the keyboard, ten envelopes, four random generators, sixteen macros, audio-rate modulation and two arpeggiators.
  • A preset browser connected to the community library: browse, preview and download presets and banks shared by other users, and share your own, without leaving the plugin.

Community presets

atlas.blindproducers.org is the community library for Atlas: the place where users share the presets and banks they make, each with an audio preview, and where anyone can find them by genre, style or tag. You don’t need an account to use the plugin or the site. Explore the banks and presets, download them, or use the community browser straight from Atlas, which shows the same library inside the plugin’s preset browser. If you would rather not see the community sections in Atlas’s browser, you can turn them off in the plugin settings. An account is only needed to upload banks or presets and to follow creators.

The launch event

Sunday, November 8 at 5 pm Eastern, live on YouTube and AudioPub. Jay Ladder will build presets from scratch, walk through the oscillators, filters, effects and modulation, show the community browser, and take questions from the chat. Bring yours.

Get it

Atlas is free and open source under the GPL. The latest release, and every pre-release with its changelog, is at atlas.blindproducers.org/download. The source code is on GitHub, and the Blind Producers Discord is the place to ask for help or share what you make.

We can’t wait to show you what Atlas is capable of, and we’re confident this marks a new start for the blind community.