Your expression. Rendered live.

AURA gains three new styles, and Tunnel was rebuilt from the ground up. Smoke breathes a fine ribbon out of every note’s pitch column on a real fluid simulation rather than particles, and every held key turns its own vortex: press harder and it spins faster, open the timbre and it grows wider, let go and the room collapses back the way it was pushed out. Shatter is a sheet of glass with a memory, where every note is a knock, every knock opens one more stage of the break, and the cracks never heal. Black Hole hangs two discs of orbiting streams around a pure black horizon and lets a bend bow the inner streams around the body. And Tunnel is new work under an old name: a flight through a tiled tube of light with no end in sight, curving away mid frame and leaving through the edge. Away from AURA, the bend wheel finally moves everything, the app can leave its own frame, and DRIFT was rebuilt around five lanes.

• Smoke: a real fluid simulation instead of particles. A hard strike blows a circle clear like a stone hitting water, and letting go pulls that displaced smoke visibly back in, exactly where your velocity sent it
• Shatter: glass with a damage history. Lean on a held key and it gives way in strobe-like jerks, bend a held note and the damage marches sideways across the pane, and only when a knock can find no glass left does the whole sheet go in a white blink
• Black Hole: two discs of silky orbiting streams around a pure black horizon, crossing along one seam where they trade colors, with the pose set by what you play
• Tunnel, rebuilt from the ground up: pressure is thrust, a full bend lays the exit out on the horizon left or right, and every strike sends a wave of light down the wall towards you. AURA now holds 27 styles, two presets each
• The bend wheel moves the whole picture: your notes live on member channels while the wheel sends on the master channel, and the visuals now sum the two the way your synth does. A held chord travels as one while a finger glide beside it still bends only its own note, in semitones rather than wheel positions
• Stage View: one shortcut clears toolbar, frames and titles, fills the screen with your layout and fades the cursor away, on the second display when one is connected. Everything keeps playing, and Esc brings the workspace back exactly as it was
• DRIFT rebuilt around five lanes instead of four fixed ones: point any lane at Pitch, Pressure or any continuous CC, pick how its voices relate (CHAOS, PARALLEL, ORBIT, SPLIT), and take its rate from the host tempo instead of Hz. The arp got real shuffle, and every readout now names what actually leaves the port rather than where the knob sits
• Point Cloud grew hands: turn, tip and lean the cloud to any pose and it holds, while Speed keeps a named motion running. The dolly reaches back to -200%, and a source that does not match your panel’s shape is no longer clipped at the picture’s own edge
• Color key and Hue key on every FORGE effect, not just as a global switch, so one effect can chase brightness while its neighbor holds a place on the picture
• CASCADE’s Step color driver moves every note one slot along a palette, and repainting the palette recolors the notes already on screen
• Hold Shift while dragging any slider and the value moves one step at a time, with the centre detents out of the way
• A consistency pass over every settings panel: each module picks its view the same way, menus line up on one column app-wide, and controls that do not apply right now gray out instead of vanishing

FORGE has always turned a picture into a scene you fly through. In 2.6 the picture itself comes apart. Point Cloud rebuilds it as a grid of points and pushes each one into real depth by the depth map, so the Virtual Camera flies between them instead of across a flat plane. And the cloud plays: strike a note and the points inside its disc come at you, pressure holds them out, slide opens the cone wider, pitch bend moves it sideways. Choose hard Dots, soft Splats, or Glyphs that stamp a character per point from a set you type in yourself, so the image comes back written in your own letters. Spin turns the whole cloud on a free axis, winding up while you play and settling back upright in silence. Cells takes the other road and leaves the frame whole, redrawing it cell by cell as ASCII, halftone or dither over any source. Both need WebGL2. And once you are done flying, 2.6 removes the last thing you needed in order to play at all: Typing Keys puts two manuals under your hands on the computer keyboard, so a laptop on a train is enough.

• FORGE Point Cloud: the picture rebuilt as a cloud of points with real depth, to fly through and to play. Hard Dots, soft Splats, or Glyphs that stamp a character per point, from a character set you type in yourself. WebGL2 required
• Point Cloud Spin: the whole cloud turns on a free axis, with Speed, Axis and Lean, winding up while you play and settling back upright in silence
• FORGE Cells: the finished frame broken into a grid and drawn cell by cell, as ASCII, Halftone or Dither, over any source. WebGL2 required
• CASCADE impacts combine: ten independent layers at the key line instead of one choice, so a shower of sparks can sit inside a fountain. An Own color switch gives every armed layer one shared colour, and note ribbons gain a Chrome finish next to Diamond and Glass
• Typing Keys: two manuals under your hands, eight white keys each, Q W E R T Y U I over Z X C V B N M , with the sharps on the row above each. Those are key positions, not letters: a QWERTZ or AZERTY board plays the same shapes under the same fingers, and the Keyboard module labels every key with the caps you actually have
• Space is the sustain pedal, Shift accents a note, and the octave moves with the arrow keys or the numpad plus and minus, far enough that every key of your chosen keyboard size can be reached
• DRIFT makes it expressive: one click turns every typed note into a full MPE voice with its own pressure, bend and CC74
• A new Play pill holds both ways to play without a controller, typing and Mouse Mode, and MIDI Out is left to ports and routing
• Expression Overview gains a fifth mode, Rack: every source drawn as the piece of studio gear you would read it on, and every row lets you pick Auto, Knob, Meter or Bar
• MIDI Learn now reaches the FORGE Conductor: three more learn slots, Enable, Range and Cycle, so a fader box or a pedal can switch it on and drift its range live, no mouse required
• The MIDI Stream Log gets four views: Events, Notes, Channels and Stats, every log remembering its own, with eight message types in colours you can edit
• DRIFT’s power switch belongs to the rest of the app: a preset states it, a snapshot restores it, and Panic switches it off, so a runaway arp cannot restart the problem it just cleared
• 25 keys as a fourth keyboard size, next to 88, 61 and 49, and the sustain pedal is read properly: switch, continuous, or detected automatically, with an invert for the normally closed ones
• Global Snapshots reorder by dragging, export or delete only the rows you mark, and ⊘ All Off reaches CASCADE and AURA so a look can start from an empty frame

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