Two things! (Both of which are exciting!)

Wheeeeee!

Today (well, tonight) is exciting because:
1) It's TBK3 day
and
2) It's Essentials Mk2 v2.02 day

(2) first:
So, they've been in testing for long enough now. They're stable and great and all round lovely. A few nice new features have gone in, and the last few niggly bugs have been cleaned up!
Felix is visiting from Paris. Despite talking every day on the phone/msn/aim/email, it DOES make a difference to actually SEE someone. I am pleased he is here! :)
So, we are shipping 2.02. No-one can find anything else for me to fix (and our testers are AMAZING! They scare me! :-D), so it's time to ship. I will be genuinely surprised if these ever make it to 2.04!! (... until we add new features! :P)
I've built all the installers, uploaded them, written the changelog (ooh! a first!). Felix is writing the mailshots, and I have to go update the webpages, and then make the installers live.
Then we have to hack a stack of SQL to send out the mailshots... and then Felix can write the press releases. Aceness.
It feels good to get closure on such an intense phase of work!

Felix has a new blog. I am gonna update the links on the side of the blog to link to him... when I figure out how... :D

(1)... TBK3... It came to life today... It is born.
It is UTTERLY F+CKING TERRIFYING!
Can't remember how much I've said about it before, so here's the skinny:
It's a compressor. With a bad attitude. Overcompression is just the starter, dual-domain envelopes is the entree, analogue-style curve softening is just another starter, the sidechain bias is rather handy, the clipper is fairly useful, the additive analogue-modelled (filtered gaussian distributed pseudorandom) noise is very chewy, and the inbuilt transient designer... well... ;)
Basically, we took everything we know about what makes analogue compressors sound nasty and evil, took it to an extreme, converted that to DSP and made it a plugin.
There is no possible "nice" use for this plugin. I have tested. Play some thin sounding beats in, and as you sweep the knob, you go all the way from "solid" to "heavy" to "crunchy hip-hop" all the way to "instant dubstep". It's just mean to the beats. But they love it ;)

I am super-excited. Can you tell? :D

It needs tweakage before I let it out the gate, 'cause I like to tweak, and I reckon I can balance the transient designer and compressor stages more tightly... and I might set an envelope follower to control the noise... and the graphics are still in progress... but oh boy, this is gonna upset a few people! :D :D :D

If you've read this far, then you must REALLY like me, so come and find me at SoundsExpo!! I'll wear my blue t-shirt which says "Code Monkey"(friday) or my black t-shirt that says "Insufficient Memory"(saturday). I might even have a namebadge! I'm the one with glasses hanging around with the REALLY tall dude with dreadlocks (Felix). Come say Hi!! :) I'll be there friday + saturday.

Hope to see you there!! :)

Dave.