v1.1.0
2026-10-11
latest
Eleven new pedals, and somewhere to put them
added
- Pedals can finally sit after the amp. The board is now three zones: before the amp, in its effects loop, and after the cab. Where you drag a pedal decides which. Until now every pedal was stuck in front of the amp, which is why adding a reverb to a high-gain preset turned it to mush: the reverb was being fed into the distortion. Each zone has its own Add button, and you can drag a pedal across a marker to move one that's already on the board. Reverb, Delay, Tape Echo and Spring Reverb are the ones worth moving. Nothing you have saved changes. Every existing preset opens with its pedals where they have always been.
- Tempo sync now works on nine pedals, not one. Both delays and every LFO pedal can lock to the metronome BPM: Tremolo, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Uni-Vibe, Rotary and Auto-Pan. The note value means the same thing on both kinds: 1/8 is an eighth-note repeat on a delay and one full sweep per eighth note on a tremolo. Still Pro.
- Parallel Mix on the Compressor, the three drives, Lo-Fi, Wah and Auto-Wah. Blends the pedal against your untouched dry signal rather than replacing it. Parallel compression that keeps the pick attack, parallel drive that keeps the clean low end underneath. It starts fully wet, so nothing you have saved sounds different. The pedals that didn't get it either already have their own Mix, or would just be reproducing another knob, or work by removing something (a gate, a swell) that a dry path would put straight back.
- Eleven new stompboxes, taking the board from 13 to 24, all free. Every one of them fills a gap rather than duplicating something already there.
- Screamer. The mid-focused drive to put in front of a high-gain amp. Its job is to tighten, not distort: the bass bypasses the clipper entirely, so the low end stays firm while the mids do the work. The Bass knob moves that split, taking it from a tight 808 to a fuller, full-range drive; with Drive down it's a clean mid-boost.
- Tape Echo. A delay whose repeats get darker, squashier and slightly unsteady as they go, so the echo decays into the mix instead of sitting on top of it. Age sets how worn the tape is, Wow how much it drifts.
- Spring Reverb. A modelled three-spring tank with the characteristic chirp and drip, Dwell for the surf splash, and a real Decay control that the existing convolution Reverb has no equivalent of.
- Wah. The manual one. Bind the treadle to an expression pedal with MIDI learn and it plays like the real thing; the Vocal knob controls how much the resonance sharpens as it opens, which is what makes a wah sound like a vowel rather than a sweep.
- Graphic EQ. Six fixed bands an octave apart, ±12 dB each. For the problems the three-band EQ can't reach: a resonant peak, one fizzy band, a specific mid contour.
- Uni-Vibe. Four all-pass stages at unequal frequencies, which is what makes it throb where a phaser sweeps. Mix doubles as the original's chorus/vibrato switch.
- Rotary. A rotating speaker cabinet, horn and drum turning at different rates over a crossover. Each rotation bends the pitch, swings the level and moves the image at once, and the Inertia control means a speed change takes a second or two to arrive, the way a real cabinet does.
- Doubler. Two differently-delayed, independently-drifting copies hard left and right, for the double-tracked rhythm sound. Where Auto-Pan moves one guitar around, this makes it sound like there are two of you.
- Octave. An octave up and a sub-octave blended against your dry signal, both done the analogue way. Monophonic by design: it tracks single notes and gets unpredictable on chords, exactly like the pedals it's modelled on.
- Swell. Removes the pick attack so every note fades in like a bowed string, and re-arms on each new note rather than only the first of a phrase.
- Lo-Fi. Sample-rate decimation and bit-crushing, un-filtered so the aliasing comes through. For when the guitar should sound broken on purpose.
- Eight new built-in presets, taking the set from 11 to 19. Between them they put every one of the new pedals into a rig you can hear it in, rather than leaving you to find it. Cocked Wah parks the wah rather than sweeping it, for the fixed-vowel lead sound. Uni-Vibe Drift is fuzz into a vibe, in that order, because the other way round the fuzz flattens the throb. Rotary Cabinet puts the rotor where a rotor goes, after the preamp and before the speaker, in stereo. Double Tracked is the doubler after the cab, which is what two takes actually are. Octave Grind is a sub-octave under a tight rhythm. Broken Radio runs the Lo-Fi inside the amp's loop so the speaker tames the worst of it, into a worn tape echo. Recto Chug and Tweed Breakup use the Modern Recto and Tweed Combo voicings, which have shipped since 1.0.4 without a single preset using them.
changed
- Nothing you have saved changes. The new pedals are additions, and every pedal in a preset you saved stays in front of the amp, so your own sounds open as you left them.
- The eleven original built-in presets were rebuilt. All of them predate the three zones, so every reverb, delay and echo in them was feeding the amp's distortion. Those now sit after the cab. Jet Sweep Rhythm's flanger and Pulsing Clean's tremolo moved into the loop, and Pulsing Clean swapped its reverb for the spring tank. Blues Crunch and Tight Metal trade their overdrive for the Screamer, and Tight Metal's mid scoop moved from in front of the amp to a Graphic EQ after the speaker. Funk Wah is the one preset left alone. Names and order are the same, so a DAW project saved on one of them reopens on the same preset. One exception: a VST3 automation lane drawn on the plugin's Preset parameter will land on different presets now the list is longer, and needs redrawing. CLAP is not affected.
- Compressor: the desktop app and the plugin were up to 22 dB quieter than the browser with a compressor engaged, because the browser's compressor applies an automatic makeup gain that the native one did not. They now match. Presets built in the browser will sound right in the plugin for the first time; a preset dialled in the desktop app or plugin will be louder than you left it, by the amount the browser was always applying.
- The rig is laid out in two rows on desktop. The pedalboard is now the whole signal path, three zones with an AMP and a CAB marker between them, and the amp and cab controls sit on a row of their own below it, each colour-matched to its marker above. Everything used to share one line, which ran off the side of a laptop screen while the bottom half of the window sat empty. Phones and narrow windows keep the single top-to-bottom column.
- Pedal colours are easier to read in the Daylight theme. Every accent was a fixed lightness tuned for the dark themes, which washed out on a light background.
- A fresh plugin instance now opens with its reverb after the cab rather than in front of the amp, the first sound a new user hears was a reverb being distorted.
- The meters stopped redrawing everything around them. The two bars that host the input and output meters were re-rendering about 136 times a second each, because they subscribed to every engine update rather than the two numbers they display. They now redraw when something they show changes, which on a quiet rig is almost never.
- Native builds are compiled with link-time optimisation, which had never been switched on. The Windows bridge binary is 11.7% smaller; the plugin barely moves, because most of its size is the embedded editor and the factory IRs.
- Shipping plugin builds no longer expose the editor's developer tools. They were left on from development, and a plugin loaded into someone else's DAW has no business offering a console over your session.
- The plugin and the desktop app now send your account token only to axion.cab. Both would previously have sent it to any host a server response named.
- The pedal browser is grouped and searchable. Twenty-four effects in one flat list was a wall, so they now sit under the eight headings the documentation already used, dynamics, drive, EQ, filter, modulation, pitch, time and space, lo-fi, with a search box at the top. And a pedal's colour now tells you its family rather than which pedal it is: drives are warm, modulation is cyan, time and space is blue. With 24 types there were no longer enough distinguishable hues to give each one its own, and the colour had stopped meaning anything; the two-letter badge in each pedal's header is what identifies it now.
fixed
- The plugin's built-in presets were up to 3.3 dB quieter than the same presets in the browser. They were baked from an earlier round of level tuning and never rebuilt; they now match what you hear on the web.
- On desktop and in the plugin, adding or removing a pedal knocked a tempo-synced delay back to its hand-set time. It had been that way since sync shipped; generalising sync to nine pedals is what surfaced it.
- A free account could get stuck with tempo sync on. Sync is a Pro feature, but a shared or gallery preset can arrive with it switched on. The knob then sat locked to the beat, and the button that should have released it opened the upgrade dialog instead. Turning sync off no longer needs Pro.
- Two built-in presets were 14 dB too quiet. Ambient Cathedral and Pulsing Clean are the only two that are not in the front-page demo, and so were the only two never checked by ear after the amp changed in 1.0.4. Both now match the rest of the set.
- Switching between the analytical amp and a NAM capture threw away your input trim. The level jumped by as much as 12 dB in either direction while the knob still showed the number you set.
- The tuner couldn't see an 8-string's low F#1. Its floor sat at about 47 Hz and that string is 46.25 Hz, so it read as no note at all rather than as a flat one. It reaches down to 30 Hz now, which clears a 9-string's B0 with room to spare.
- A mouse wheel over a knob turned the knob and scrolled the pedalboard out from under it. The wheel is captured properly now.
- Long loops dropped audio. Starting an overdub, undoing one, or exporting a take each copied the entire loop on the audio thread. At the four-minute cap that is about 92 MB of copying inside one render block, so it was a guaranteed dropout. All three are spread across render blocks now, and the undo snapshot only covers the part you actually overdubbed.
- Swapping a NAM capture clicked. Building the new model is real work and it happens on the audio thread, so the swap now fades out, loads, and fades back in.
- Two quick pedal edits in a row could leave a pedal you could hear but couldn't see. Each edit read the board, waited for the audio to ramp, then wrote back what it had read, so the second edit could discard the first while its audio stayed connected. Structural edits queue now.
- Cloud sync. Choosing "keep mine" on a conflict did nothing at all if the upload failed, and the conflict reappeared on the next pull looking as though it had come back by itself; it now says so and keeps the conflict. A lapsed subscription could also leave sync records behind that made a never-uploaded preset look uploaded. And the status pill no longer flickers between idle and syncing every five seconds when there is nothing to sync.
- A corrupt or hostile
.namfile could take the audio engine down instead of being refused. - In the plugin, stopping and restarting at a different sample rate or buffer size could bring back a rig built for the old one, with its cab and delays sized wrong.
- The plugin could crash its host. On Windows, removing the plugin or closing the project just after the host had switched its preset could take the DAW down with it. In the CLAP version, a corrupt saved project could do the same, and loading a project didn't tell the host its parameter values had changed.
- A single failed read from browser storage used to disable saving for the rest of the session. It retries now. A stale tab left open also no longer blocks a later version from upgrading the local database.
- A saved preset that failed to load looked exactly like having no saved preset. Axion says which it was.
- Cleared two sources of per-sample CPU spikes: the presence and air filters could fall into denormal arithmetic on long decays, and the Windows bridge was writing its diagnostics from the real-time audio thread.
Most of the fixes below the first three came out of a full audit of the codebase, twenty-six findings across the audio engine, the sync loop, the plugin and the browser app. Everything it turned up is fixed or written down.