筑波音響  /  TSUKUBA ONKYO

Akadem

Audio plug-ins for macOS that solve circuits sample by sample

Available now

Akadem Drive AD-1 — a saturator. Valve, germanium, transformer and op-amp: five real circuits, each solved one sample at a time. Free, full version.

macOS 11 or later  ·  Audio Unit / CLAP  ·  unsigned (the bundled script clears the quarantine flag)

See AD-1 ›

How to read the model numbers

Akadem products are named A + the initial of the category + the generation number.

AD-1Akadem Drive — drive / saturation, first generation

Only one row is filled in so far. We do not list the names of products that have not shipped. Naming something that does not exist yet turns it into a promise. When one ships, a row appears in this table.

There will be no Pro or Lite

This is settled, so it is worth stating. We will not release a higher or lower tier of the same product.

Model numbers are hardware vocabulary; Pro and Lite are software vocabulary. The two do not mix. Putting -1 on a piece of gear and later shipping a “Pro version” of the same gear breaks the promise that the number means a generation.

If we want to add features, we ship the next generation as AD-2. And we will not remove features in order to make a cheaper tier. The only things we could remove from AD-1 are circuits or solver accuracy, and removing the latter would mean “giving away for free only the setting with the most aliasing”. That is not a product.

True of every product

OSmacOS only. There is no Windows build
FormatsAudio Unit (v2) and CLAP. There is no VST3why
Hosts that cannot load itAbleton Live / Cubase (no CLAP support)  ·  Pro Tools (no AAX build)
CircuitCircuit equations solved one sample at a time, not an approximated distortion curve

The part that solves the circuit is the same implementation as in Rosso, our free circuit simulator. You can go and handle the circuits themselves there first.