Frequently asked questions

The beta is free and opens on 15 August 2026 — no card required, no sign-up form. Leave your email on the download page and your download link lands by email the moment it opens.

There is one build for everyone, and it never stops working. It’s completely free to use until October 15, 2026. After that, if it isn’t activated it simply continues as a demo — fully playable, with a gentle few-second dip roughly every couple of minutes. Register a license at any time — even during the beta — to unlock the full version forever, with no interruptions; sales open October 15, 2026 (€149 one-time).

Yes. Ten beta users of our choosing get the full license free. And if at least one of your submitted presets ships in the factory bank, a solid discount is the least you’ll get. All perks are at our discretion — the beta comes with no guarantees.

Any preset you submit can ship as a factory preset, credited to you — submitting grants us that right and creates no obligation on our side. If at least one of yours ships, a solid discount is the least you’ll get. Picks and perks are at our discretion. Submissions are open until October 1, 2026.

Your own work does. User banks, favorites and your license are files on your machine that an update leaves alone, and a saved project stores the sound itself rather than a pointer to a bank slot. The factory banks are the exception: they ship inside the build and are still being curated, so a new beta build brings a new factory library. If you have built on top of a factory patch, press SAVE and put it in a user bank first — or write it out with EXPORT. Presets & Banks has the detail.

Yes — the demo is simply the same build, unactivated, from October 15, 2026 onward. Everything works; the only limit is a gentle few-second dip roughly every couple of minutes. Activate a license at any point to remove it. During the beta the build is entirely free with no dip.

When the beta opens — planned for 15 August 2026 — you’ll get an email with a download link for macOS and Windows (we pre-select your platform). Joining now pre-registers you. It’s free to use, and a license key can be registered at any time — even before October 15, 2026.

Yes — monophonic by design. One voice lets the engines and the oversampling spend everything on that voice: denser unison, hotter feedback paths and heavier processing than a polyphonic budget would allow.

Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) synthesis turns a control circuit from radio engineering into a voice: one oscillator constantly chases the pitch of another. Keep the loop tight and it locks into solid, weighty bass with analog character. Loosen it and it hunts, glides and overshoots — sirens, growls and living drones.

MORPH sweeps twelve waveform families on one slider — detuned unison saws, hard sync, additive, vowels and wavetables — with click-free crossfades.

No AI in the sound. The generative tools — the probability sequencer and Suggest — run on deterministic music theory: rules you can read and predict.

No. Phaseburn One is built from published research plus our own algorithms, and it emulates nothing. We credit the researchers whose techniques we implement — the character is ours.

Yes — and that is rarer than it sounds. Most synths generate a mono voice and widen it afterwards with chorus, doublers or stereo wideners. Phaseburn One generates left and right independently at the source: the loops run per side, Vector Phase Shaping can diverge the two channels, and the unison stack runs its voices per channel. There is still a chorus — as a choice, not a crutch.

Yes. Phaseburn One has a stereo sidechain input that appears in the patchbay as a source called AUDIO IN, alongside the oscillators. Cable it into the filter, the granular freezer, the bitcrusher or any other effect and it processes your audio — no note required.

It can also become the phase-locked loop’s reference: patch AUDIO IN into PLL REF and the oscillator chases your signal. This is not pitch tracking — the note you play still sets where the loop sits, so the incoming audio drags the pitch around rather than dictating it. Feed it drums and the pitch lurches on every hit; play against it and the loop audibly fights.

Strong alias suppression, engineered in: a 64-bit floating-point core, built-in oversampling on the stages that need it, and band-limited oscillator modes for clean highs.

VST3 · CLAP — on macOS 11+ (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows 10/11 x64.

Any host that loads VST3 or CLAP should work — the list is broad. That said, v0.1.0 is early access: if anything behaves oddly in your host, tell us through the contact form.

€149 one-time for a perpetual license, on sale from October 15, 2026. For EU customers, VAT is included in every displayed price. Until then the build is free for everyone, and a license key can be registered at any time.

You activate once with your key — that takes an internet connection for a couple of seconds — and from then on the plugin verifies your license on your own machine, fully offline. No account, no always-online check; it survives updates and keeps working forever, even if our servers ever go away. The license works on up to 3 of your machines at once, and moving to a new machine is self-service on the license page. A license is tied to your email; each activation also records a one-way machine fingerprint (a hash — it can’t be reversed into your hardware), plus the machine’s OS and hostname as a label you can rename or remove on that page. That’s all — no accounts, no tracking.

Click the logo in the plugin, paste your license key and hit Activate — no account needed. On a machine with no internet, the plugin shows a machine code: type it into the license page from any other device and drop the file it gives you onto the plugin. Lost your key? Re-send it from the same page.

Cards, processed securely by Paddle — our authorised reseller and Merchant of Record, who also handles VAT.

You can try the full synth before you buy — it’s free until October 15, 2026, and a demo after that — and your statutory rights always apply. Details live on the refunds page.

Through the contact form — a small team reads everything, and you can expect a reply within a few days.

The full manual lives at Documentation — eleven chapters, from Getting Started to a complete parameter reference. The same manual is built into the plugin (the DOCS button, or right-click any control → Open in manual), and you can download it whole as a PDF from the documentation page.