Subject: FREEZE FRAME 47. Model FF-47, version 1.28.0. Formats: VST3, AU (Audio Unit), and a Standalone app. The VST3 files under Fx|Delay; the AU registers as an Effect. Company of record: Sound Detective. Plugin code: FF47.
The unit is a freeze pedal for the DAW, grown into an instrument. Arm it and play. It captures the last moment of audio — anywhere from 50 ms to 8 seconds — as a seamless loop, and holds that loop as a playable sustained texture. A full ADSR shapes the hold. Variable-speed playback retunes it from 0.25x to 4x. Tape-style drift and grain texture put wear on it. The moment stops. You keep working it.
Lineage matters here. This is the FREEZE FRAME pedal from Parallel Matrix, extracted and given its own case file. The stock sound is not an approximation of the pedal — it is the pedal.
Three house rules define the design:
1. Every advanced feature is gated so the stock path never moves a float. Defaults are not "close" — they null.
2. Captures follow the phrase you actually played. The trap never freezes silence or an empty buffer. Dead air is not evidence.
3. Sample Time and Loop Crossfade can be re-sliced live on a ringing hold — no re-arm, even after the input has gone quiet.
Two more residents live behind the face. STAKEOUT is a second, live engine: it never captures anything, it shapes the wire directly with a time-band envelope shaper. The EVIDENCE VAULT is a disk-first performance recorder — takes up to 10 minutes, written straight to WAV, with region editing, looping audition, and drag-to-DAW export.
The problem it solves: sustain on demand. Any source — a chord, a breath, a cymbal, a word — becomes a held instrument you can play, retune, age, pump, and record, without printing a single clip first.
One input, two engines, one exit. Read it top to bottom.
THE RING. The engine keeps a raw copy of the input and an 8.6-second ring behind the trap. The raw copy exists because the exits need it: the dry sum, the BLEND rescue, and the bypass crossfade all mix against untouched signal. The ring is the capture memory — phrase-gated catches read from it, and a live re-slice rebuilds the loop from a raw master copy of the phrase it caught.
THE FREEZE PATH. Two loop voices crossfade over 80 ms, so a re-capture or a live re-slice splices without a click. The SPEED head reads the loop at its ratio; SPEED BLEND can add a unison head reading the same material with the same motion. Musical Speed, Just Pitch and Just Speed re-interpret the head before DRIFT and TEXTURE put motion and wear inside the hold. The Freeze Mode shapers and an anti-alias lowpass sit last in the loop — the lowpass tracks SPEED because a fast-spun loop throws images. The ADSR times the layer's gain, CHASE decides when the trap re-grabs, and Capture Quantize decides when a wanted catch is allowed to land. Then the sum: dry, ducked by FREEZE, plus the layer at MIX.
THE STAKEOUT PATH. No capture exists here. The wire runs through DRIFT's tape wow, SPEED as a live pitch shifter (bypassed exactly at unity), TEXTURE, and then a continuous time-band shaper — or tempo-locked Pump/Pulse cycles on the grid. MIX becomes a true wet/dry crossfade, because there is no layer to duck against.
THE WET GUARD. A tanh ceiling — MatrixChannel verbatim — bounds the wet path before the macro stages see it.
THE MACRO LAYER. The MACRO ERA switch selects which stack runs: the FF47 Custom stages (MOTION vibrato, DAMAGE wear, DUST tuned dark, FOCUS EQ) or the PM (HQ) v1.0 formulas. Either way the macros work the wet path only. FOCUS's high- and lowpass filtering stays wet-only, BLEND scales the wet against a dry add below 50, and the two meet at the sum.
THE EXIT. OUT TRIM and the OUTPUT macro multiply together, then a tanh safety clip at −0.2 dBFS holds the ceiling. The bypass crossfade against the raw input comes after, followed by a NaN scrub. The Vault taps the chain twice: WET before the dry add, FULL OUTPUT after the bypass crossfade — exactly what you hear. The Vault's own audition mix is added last, ramped and ceiling-guarded, so a preview can never end up inside a take.
Power, preset transport, meters, and the master trim live on the title strip.
Level-crossfaded true bypass. A 40 ms smoothed gain crossfades the processed path against the untouched input — procSm, the same constant Parallel Matrix uses — so toggling never clicks. The red power glyph shows the state.
UI-driven internal presets — deliberately NOT host programs, so a host replaying program changes can never stomp your session state. Applying a preset resets every parameter to its default first, then overlays the preset's values. No residue from the previous scene.
SAVE and LOAD write the full APVTS state as XML .ff47case files to Documents/Sound Detective/Freeze Frame 47 Presets, with v1-to-v2 sync-index migration on load.
Master output trim, 20 ms smoothed, multiplied with the OUTPUT macro just before the safety clipper. One number worth knowing: set to −12.0 dB it reproduces Parallel Matrix's lane-return level exactly. FF47 sits at unity because it has one lane, not four.
Block-rate peak meters with 0.82x decay per block, fed from the raw input and the final output.
The capture heart: two big faders and the trap switches. Everything else in the unit serves what happens here.
Two jobs on one fader: capture sensitivity and dry takeover.
Sensitivity maps exponentially (mapExp, 0.12 down to 0.004) — the higher you set it, the quieter the material the trap will catch.
While a hold plays, the dry input is ducked in proportion to the fader through an attack/release-following duck envelope. At 100 the frozen layer fully REPLACES the dry. The layer's own gain reaches unity by 50 and fades to a TRUE off at 0 — rolling FREEZE down always silences a runaway loop. It is the panic fader.
In STAKEOUT this fader becomes SEPARATION: band contrast, a power law of 1+2x applied to each time band.
Loop playback speed on an exact exponential map: ratio = 0.25 × 16^(px/100). The landmarks: 0 / 25 / 50 / 75 / 100 land on 0.25x / 0.5x / 1x / 2x / 4x — that is −24 / −12 / 0 / +12 / +24 semitones, one semitone every 25/12 fader units. 80 ms of smoothing makes every move click-free.
The Advanced drawer re-interprets this fader: Musical Speed changes how it lands, Pitch Behaviour changes what it moves. In STAKEOUT it becomes a live pitch-shift interval that bypasses exactly at unity.
An anti-alias lowpass tracks the fader — 16 kHz at 1x, down to 4 kHz when spun fast.
Equal-power crossfade between the SPEED-shifted read head and a second unison head at 1x reading the same loop with the same drift and wobble motion. 100 is the SPEED head alone — the bit-exact stock path, unison head skipped entirely. 0 is original speed only. 50 is both. 50 ms smoothed.
With Just Pitch engaged the fader is repurposed: unpitched against pitched.
The trap. While armed, the engine waits for roughly 0.18 s of real phrase above the sensitivity floor, then catches. It never freezes silence or an empty buffer.
Once caught, the loop quietly GROWS while the same gesture continues — re-captures happen behind an 80 ms voice crossfade, so the hold thickens without a seam.
Re-arming over a live hold demands FRESH audio: the trap catches the NEXT phrase, never the history. Un-arming sends the hold into Release.
In STAKEOUT, ARM is the performance switch — it glides the shaper in and out over roughly 20 ms.
First press releases the hold on the RELEASE knob's time. A second press during any release is an instant 40 ms wipe.
Clearing while armed disables all catching until ARM is cycled — the pedal's own rule. The GUI relabels the button RE-ARM (the uiNeedRearm flag), so the trap state is never invisible.
Lit by the engine's freeze-engaged signal: ADSR level times clear gain. Dark lamp, no hold.
A full ADSR on the audible frozen layer — freeze as an instrument, not a switch. In STAKEOUT these four faders change jobs entirely: they become time-band level faders on the live wire.
The rise of the frozen layer after a catch — a one-pole climb toward full. The same setting times the dry-duck's rise, PUMP's duck-down speed, and PULSE's snap-up in Stakeout Beat mode.
Stakeout shaper: the 0 ms band fader — the smack. 50 leaves the band untouched, 100 is +12 dB, 0 removes it (square law).
The fall from the attack peak to the SUSTAIN level. With SUSTAIN at 0 the hold dies out entirely and the engine returns to Idle — a freeze that plays like a plucked note.
Stakeout Beat (Pump/Pulse): the floor HOLD time. Stakeout shaper: the 10 ms band fader — the punch.
The level the frozen layer holds at while ARM stays down.
Stakeout: the bed level between triggers, PUMP's duck floor, and PULSE's boost depth — up to +3x. Shaper: the 250 ms band fader — the body.
The fade-out when you un-arm or clear, and the dry-duck's return rate.
One override: DAW transport stop caps the fade at roughly 0.15 s tau, regardless of the knob. Stop means stop.
Stakeout Beat: the swell-back speed. Shaper: the tail band fader — the air.
Two small panels, four knobs: what the hold sounds like inside, and the terms on which it meets the dry.
Grain and wear on the frozen layer. Three ingredients, crossfaded in by amount: mu-law bit reduction (16 bits down to 7 at maximum), tanh drive (1.0–1.9x, unity-compensated), and a slow random read-position wobble that scales with the knob.
0 is bit-exact clean. Works identically on the Stakeout wire.
Movement of the read head. The style is set in the Advanced drawer.
SCAN (stock): a slow sine position-scan sweeps there-and-back through the frozen material — rate 0.04–0.32 Hz, rising with the knob. The excursion is capped at the 0.85 s stock loop scale, so long Sample Times cannot audibly rewind.
BREATHE: forward-only tape wow. The head's rate breathes on a slow random walk, roughly ±70 cents at full, and can never scrub backwards.
The knob glides over roughly 40 ms — ride it mid-hold without a crackle.
The level of the frozen layer added over the FREEZE-ducked dry: out = dry × duck + layer × MIX × layerGain. The SPACE macro scales this knob — ×0 at 0, ×2 at 100.
In STAKEOUT there is no layer to duck against, so MIX becomes a true wet/dry crossfade.
Accent re-sampling — the difference between a statue and a shadow.
At 0, a held loop NEVER re-catches by itself; toggle ARM to re-catch. That is the stock locked-loop law, bit-pure.
As it rises, the trap re-grabs on smaller accents (threshold sweeping from 3.0x down to 1.15x the held level) and more often (minimum gap 1.2 s down to 0.25 s). A Schmitt dip-gate re-arms at high CHASE on a groove's own inter-hit gaps — at maximum it stutters along with the music.
Inert in STAKEOUT.
Seven performance macros across the bottom of the face. Every one is a true bypass at its default — that is how the default plugin nulls against Parallel Matrix. The MACRO ERA switch in the Advanced drawer swaps this whole layer between the FF47 Custom stages and the PM (HQ) v1.0 formulas; both readings are given below where they differ.
PM's overlay formula. At 50 and above the wet path is full (wetGain = min(1, v/50)). Below 50 the wet fades down while untouched dry is added in (dryAdd = 1 − v/50). A quick global wet/dry rescue when a hold swallows the mix. 30 ms smoothed.
FF47 Custom era: analog wear on the wet path, in order — a transient-dulling pre-lowpass (20 kHz down to 6.5 kHz), slope-compensated tanh with asymmetric crunch (drive up to 3.6x), program-dependent tape compression, mu-law bit grain fading in past halfway (16 down to 7 bits), and a whisper of wavefold past 82. Makeup-compensated throughout. It ages the layer; it does not wreck it.
PM (HQ) era: the original console-color saturation — drive up to +1.2, slope-compensated exactly as MatrixChannel.
FF47 Custom era: pure vibrato inside the freeze. A fully-wet modulated delay whose base and depth both scale from zero — no comb filtering and no click on leaving 0. Two LFOs at different rates, L/R in quadrature for stereo breathing, plus a slow 6–13 kHz lowpass sway.
PM (HQ) era: scales the pedal's DRIFT knob instead — 50 neutral, 0 kills it, 100 doubles it. PM's exact formula.
PM's exact overlay: scales the pedal's MIX knob by v/50. 0 silences the layer, 100 doubles it, clamped to 100.
FF47 Custom era: the Global Dust 12.47 engine, tuned dark and cinematic. As the knob rises: engine depth 30–85, bits 18–52, aged clock 12–52, dark tape noise 0–42, wow/flutter 24–58, jitter 0–28 — and the tone lowpass FALLS from 42 to 20, darker as the dust rises. 100% mix, level-compensated. The 12.47 engine envelope-gates its dust bed to the program, so the noise follows the freeze level instead of hissing over silence.
PM (HQ) era: the stock bright 12.47 bed at PM's formula — on above 0.25, amount = 25 × v/50. Default 0 is off: PM's shipped dust_on=false sound.
FF47 Custom era: a bipolar attention control on the wet path only. Below 50 the layer sits back — darker and wider (LPF 20 kHz down to 5 kHz, high shelf off, width up to +40%, a slight dip). Above 50 it steps forward — a 3 kHz presence bell up to +4.5 dB, 300 Hz low-mid cleanup, a +8 kHz shelf, HPF 20–90 Hz, image narrowed up to 15%. Makeup-compensated; the mid/side width is mono-safe.
PM (HQ) era: the one-way ramp. 0 is neutral; rising, the HPF climbs 20–280 Hz while the top darkens to 3.5 kHz.
PM's macro gain: (v − 50) × 0.48 dB — that is −24 dB at 0 up to +24 dB at 100 — multiplied with OUT TRIM before the −0.2 dBFS tanh safety clip. 30 ms smoothed.
The Advanced drawer opens below the face (+252 px). Every default inside it reproduces the PM pedal exactly — open the drawer, touch nothing, and the sound has not moved. The CAPTURE panel is contextual: with ENGINE set to Stakeout, TRIGGER replaces the Free/Sync mode box and BEAT SHAPE replaces Quantize.
Free reads the ms knob. Sync resolves musical lengths from host BPM and time signature. Sync with no host tempo falls back to the Free knob, and the panel says so: TEMPO UNAVAILABLE.
The capture and loop length. 850 in Free mode is a sentinel meaning PM stock — the default capture stays bit-identical to (int)(sr × 0.85).
Turn it WHILE a hold rings and the frozen material re-slices live from an internal raw master copy, end-aligned: shrinking zooms INTO the moment, growing reaches BACK into the phrase. The splice rides the same 80 ms crossfade a re-capture uses. No re-arm, works after the input has gone silent, rate-limited to once every 120 ms.
Musical capture length against host BPM and time signature: 1/32, 1/16T, 1/16, 1/16D, 1/8T, 1/8, 1/8D, 1/4T, 1/4, 1/4D, 1/2T, 1/2, 1/2D, 1 Bar, 2 Bars, 4 Bars. Clamped to the engine's 50 ms – 8 s span; the readout flags "8.00 s MAX" when clamped.
In Stakeout Beat mode this same dropdown becomes the trigger RATE. Old v1 sessions (the 7-entry list) are index-migrated on load.
Gates EVERY retrigger capture — the first catch, phrase catches while ARM stays latched, CHASE re-grabs — sample-accurately onto the next beat or bar. The countdown is resolved from the host playhead each block. A wanted capture goes pending and the QUEUED lamp lights.
Off, transport stopped, or no host position: the stock immediate path. Transport stop cancels a queued capture.
Freeze is the stock capture pedal. Stakeout is the live engine: no capture at all. The wire runs through DRIFT (real tape wow via a wobbled ring read), SPEED as a live pitch shifter (unity-bypassed), TEXTURE, then a continuous time-band shaper — a follower cascade at 0 ms / 10 ms / 250 ms / 800 ms decomposes the energy, the ADSR faders become band levels, and FREEZE becomes band separation. Nothing ever has to decide when to fire, so nothing ever fires late.
FREEZE sensitivity, CHASE, and Sample Time captures are inert in Stakeout.
Shaper is the always-on band shaper described above. Beat fires tempo-locked gain cycles on the grid set by the Sync Length dropdown. Beat needs host tempo, and ARM must be down for cycles to fire.
PUMP is sidechain-style duck-and-breathe: on each grid tick the level slams toward the SUSTAIN floor (ATTACK sets the duck speed), holds (DECAY sets the hold time), then swells back (RELEASE). PULSE is the inverse — an accent boost: SUSTAIN sets the depth up to +3x, ATTACK the snap-up, DECAY the let-go.
Three more panels in the drawer: how the SPEED fader is read, what the hold does while it rings, and one-click variation. A live readout in the SPEED panel shows the interval, cents and ratio — "+M3 +12c", "0.50x".
On, the SPEED fader reads and lands in musical intervals — the fader map is exactly 0.48 semitones per unit, so the math is a straight line. Latch ticks are drawn on the fader.
Off is the original continuous fader, untouched. The shipped sound never moves.
Display Only labels the readout without touching the engine. Soft Latch continuously warps the fader to flatten around musical targets — octaves, fifths and unison strong; thirds, fourths and sixths secondary — while never locking out the in-between values: monotonic, no dead zone. Hard Snap rounds to the full chromatic grid.
The pedal's 80 ms speed smoothing makes every landing click-free.
Speed + Pitch is the classic sampler path, untouched — faster is higher.
Just Pitch parks the loop at exactly 1x — time and Sample Time length locked — and pitch-shifts the layer by the fader's interval through the Dust 12.47 two-tap Doppler shifter, time-aligned so blending never flams. SPEED BLEND becomes unpitched against pitched.
Just Speed is the mirror: the loop really changes speed and the shifter counter-shifts by the exact inverse interval. Time stretches; pitch stays put.
All modes ride one-pole smoothed amounts that rest at exactly 0 in Normal — the branch is skipped and the PM path stays bit-exact — so switching crossfades and never clicks.
REVERSE: a tape-style direction flip, position continuous through the turnaround. SWELL: each catch rises in over roughly 1.4 s with a gentle 0.16 Hz level sway. STUTTER: rhythmic chop at 1/8-notes from host tempo (bpm/30, clamped 0.5–16 Hz; 4 Hz free-running). GHOST: blended toward a 2.4 kHz lowpass with extra wobble, sitting back 10% — darker and smearier.
The loop-boundary overlap length. The engine floors it at the stock 1024 samples, so 0 is bit-exact. Longer values smear the seam for pad-like holds. Turning it during a hold re-slices live, same as Sample Time.
Which macro layer runs — a permanent A/B, kept by design. FF47 Custom is the phase-2 DAMAGE / MOTION / FOCUS / DUST stages, neutral at their defaults. PM (HQ) is the v1.0 overlay exactly as Parallel Matrix ships it — MOTION scales DRIFT, FOCUS is the one-way ramp, DUST is the stock bright bed, DAMAGE is console color. The era is held to PM by CompareTest 2d: a null below −80 dBFS with all macros hot.
One click, one musical variation. It randomizes TEXTURE, DRIFT, DAMAGE, MOTION, SPACE, DUST, FOCUS, SPEED BLEND, Sample Time (applied at the next capture), occasionally the Freeze Mode (35% of clicks, when safe), and SPEED.
It NEVER touches MIX, BLEND, OUTPUT, OUT TRIM, FREEZE, ARM, or CLEAR. No level blasts, and a held capture is never cleared.
Constrains every shuffle window to musical ranges — SPACE hugs 38–62 because it scales MIX up to 2x, SPEED stays roughly 0.5x–2x, DUST caps at 35, Sample Time 150–3000 ms. Off opens the full ranges. The name is the warning.
What the DRIFT knob moves — see DRIFT, File 06. The engine morphs between styles over roughly 40 ms, snapped at the rails, so a settled Scan state is bit-pure PM.
A disk-first performance recorder. The drawer stacks under the Advanced drawer (+252 px), zooms to a big wave editor, or takes over the whole face (EXPAND, 1180 × 800). Takes land immediately as WAVs in the vault folder, survive sessions, and drag straight into the DAW. Only the three combo boxes are host parameters; everything else is deliberately UI-driven.
What a take records. Wet Only is the processed freeze path — post FOCUS, trim and OUTPUT, through the same −0.2 dBFS ceiling — WITHOUT the dry add or the bypass crossfade: the layer alone, ready to fly in anywhere. Full Output is exactly what you hear.
Manual records until you stop, against a 600 s (10 minute) safety rail, while you play the plugin. Fixed Length auto-stops at the chosen length. Follow Sample Time auto-stops at exactly one resolved capture length — the Free ms value or the synced musical length. One loop, one file.
The Fixed Length target. Bar values resolve against host tempo and time signature; a warning shows if bars are selected with no host tempo.
Starts or discards a take. One take at a time; starting a take stops any looping audition, so the monitor is never muddied.
Recording streams to disk on a dedicated IO thread — RAM stays flat regardless of length. If the disk falls behind, a dropped-blocks warning is surfaced. Take finalization runs on the processor's own 400 ms timer, so takes complete even with the editor closed.
Looped or one-shot audition of a take's region, mixed into the output through a 5 ms smoothed gain with its own ceiling guard — it cannot click and cannot exceed safety. Locators and drawable fade-in/out edit live. Click-to-seek jumps the playhead, re-ramped, never clicking. Playback is double-buffered by file path: restarting a cached take costs zero disk I/O.
File management over the on-disk WAV store: rename, DELETE, EXPORT SEL, EXPORT ALL, SET FOLDER, OPEN FOLDER, ZOOM WAVE, EXPAND. The drag chip performs a real external file drag into the DAW — the file already exists on disk, so the drop is instant. CLEAR VAULT lives only in the full-face view, where you can see what you are burning. The drawer header names its owning track (host-provided), so two open instances can never be confused.
Eight factory scenes ship in the browser, INIT included. Applying one resets every parameter to default first, then overlays the preset's values — no residue from the last scene. Your own scenes save as .ff47case files in Documents/Sound Detective/Freeze Frame 47 Presets.
| PRESET | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| INIT | Every parameter at its default — the PM Freeze Frame pedal exactly as it wakes up. |
| ON ICE | Freeze 60, Mix 50 — the pedal as it sits in Parallel Matrix. Arm and play. |
| NOIR ORGAN BED | Slow attack, high sustain, a whisper of texture and drift — a sustained organ-ish bed under the dry performance. |
| SLOW MOTION SUSPECT | Speed 25 (half speed, −1 octave), long release, texture 22 and drift 15 — the moment slowed to 0.5x with tape wobble. |
| HOT PURSUIT | Chase 55 with fast attack and Freeze 70 — the trap re-grabs accents and stutters along with the music. |
| DUST BLOOM PAD | Big envelope, texture 40, drift 25, DUST macro 35 — a dusty, drifting pad with 12.47 machine character. |
| STAKEOUT SHIMMER | Speed 75 (double speed, +1 octave), soft envelope, Mix 40 — a shimmer layer floating over the dry. |
| DEEP FREEZE | Freeze 100, Sustain 100 — total takeover: the frozen layer replaces the input entirely while it holds. |
Eight procedures from the field. Settings are literal — set them, then adjust to the scene.
01. THE PANIC FADER. Automate FREEZE as a performance move. At 100 the hold completely replaces the dry — full takeover. At 0 it is a TRUE off. Rolling it down always silences a runaway loop, so one fader is both the drama and the exit.
02. RE-SLICE THE RINGING HOLD. With a freeze held, turn Sample Time (or Loop Crossfade). The loop rebuilds live from the raw captured phrase — no re-arm, even after you have stopped playing. Shrinking zooms INTO the frozen moment; growing reaches BACK into the phrase. Sync mode at 1/8 or 1/16 turns a pad hold into a tempo-locked cell.
03. STATUE OR SHADOW. CHASE at 0 locks the loop forever — toggle ARM to re-catch. Around 50 it re-grabs real accents and follows the music. Near maximum it stutters along with the groove. Pair with Capture Quantize set to Beat so every re-grab lands on the grid.
04. THE CHROMATIC TIME-STRETCHER. Pitch Behaviour: Just Speed. Musical Speed: on, Hard Snap. The loop genuinely changes speed while the shifter counter-shifts by the exact inverse interval. Automate SPEED for tempo ramps that never change key.
05. SHIMMER WITH A BODY. SPEED at 75 (+1 octave), SPEED BLEND at roughly 50. The octave head and the unison head play the same loop in equal power, and both share the same drift motion, so they stay glued.
06. PUMPING WITHOUT A SIDECHAIN. Engine: Stakeout. Trigger: Beat. Shape: Pump. It ducks to the SUSTAIN floor on the Sync Length grid — ATTACK is the duck speed, DECAY the hold, RELEASE the swell back. ARM is the performance switch: automate it to drop the pump in and out per section.
07. THE DRUM-BUS SHAPER. Engine: Stakeout, Trigger: Shaper. The ADSR faders are now TIME-band levels — 0 ms smack, 10 ms punch, 250 ms body, tail air — with FREEZE as band separation. It works on a full drum bus where triggered shapers give up, because nothing ever has to decide when to fire.
08. SHUFFLE, THEN FILE IT. SHUFFLE EVIDENCE with Safe Random on is stage-safe by construction — it never touches MIX, BLEND, OUTPUT, trim or FREEZE, and can never clear a held capture. Click it mid-hold for instant variations, then record the keepers straight into the Vault. Record Mode: Follow Sample Time gives you one exact loop per take.
Symptoms reported from the field, with findings. Most of these are the unit obeying its own rules.
| SYMPTOM | FINDING |
|---|---|
| The freeze won't catch anything anymore, even though ARM is lit. | You pressed CLEAR while armed. By the pedal's own rule that disables all catching until ARM is cycled — the ARM button relabels to RE-ARM when this is the case. Toggle ARM off and on. |
| I arm it and nothing freezes. | The trap waits for roughly 0.18 s of real audio above the sensitivity floor — it deliberately never freezes silence or an empty buffer. Play something, or raise FREEZE to increase catch sensitivity; the loop then quietly grows while the same gesture continues. Also check the QUEUED lamp: with Capture Quantize on Beat or Bar, the catch is waiting for the grid. |
| SYNC is selected but the capture length ignores my choice. | Sync needs host tempo. Without a valid BPM — standalone, or a host not reporting position — the engine falls back to the Free ms knob and the CAPTURE panel reads TEMPO UNAVAILABLE. Same for Stakeout Beat mode and Vault bar lengths; they all read the host playhead. |
| Hitting STOP in the DAW cuts my long release short. | By design. Transport stop caps the fade at roughly 0.15 s regardless of the RELEASE knob, cancels any grid-queued capture, and demands a fresh phrase before the next grab, so pre-stop history can't re-freeze itself. Un-arming or CLEAR still honours the full RELEASE time — use those for musical exits. |
| I switched to PM (HQ) era and MOTION / FOCUS seem to behave wrong. | The eras have different neutral points. In PM (HQ), MOTION scales the DRIFT knob (50 = neutral, 0 kills drift, 100 doubles it) and FOCUS is a one-way ramp where 0 = flat — the GUI prints "PM: MOTION 50 / FOCUS 0 = FLAT" as a reminder. In FF47 Custom, MOTION is its own vibrato stage (0 = static) and FOCUS is bipolar around 50. |
| In Stakeout mode the FREEZE / CHASE / Sample Time knobs do nothing. | Correct. Stakeout is the live engine — no capture exists, so capture controls are inert. FREEZE becomes band SEPARATION, the ADSR faders become band levels (or the Pump/Pulse cycle in Beat mode), MIX becomes a true wet/dry crossfade, and ARM is the shaper's on/off performance switch. |
| Vault buttons seem dead / a take never finishes. | Check the drawer's status line: if the host has suspended processing, the editor says so (the infinite-tail declaration prevents silence-suspend, but a bypassed or frozen track still stops processing). One take runs at a time, and starting a take intentionally stops any looping preview. Takes finalize on the processor's own timer. A "disk dropped N blocks" message means the drive couldn't keep up with the stream. |
| SPEC | ON RECORD |
|---|---|
| FORMATS | VST3, AU, Standalone (VST3 category Fx|Delay; AU Effect) |
| PLATFORM | macOS (built from the Parallel-Matrix repo; JUCE/CMake) |
| CHANNELS | mono to mono, stereo to stereo, mono to stereo |
| LATENCY | 0 samples reported to the host; tail declared INFINITE so hosts never suspend processing on silent input |
| GUI SIZE | 1180 × 713 design canvas (659 face + 54 dock); +252 Advanced drawer, +252 Vault drawer (they stack), 1180 × 800 full-Vault view. Freely resizable 0.5x–2.0x, aspect-locked, scale remembered per session (first open fits the screen at 80%) |
| PRESETS | 8 factory (incl. INIT) + user .ff47case files in Documents/Sound Detective/Freeze Frame 47 Presets |
| VERSION | 1.28.0 — CMake FF47_VERSION is the single source, shown on-panel as MODEL FF-47 — V1.28.0 |
| CAPTURE LENGTH | 50 ms – 8 s (Free ms or 16 synced divisions incl. triplets and dotted); stock default 0.85 s |
| SPEED RANGE | 0.25x – 4.00x (−24 to +24 semitones), exact 1.00x at centre |
| EVIDENCE VAULT | Disk-first WAV recorder, takes up to 600 s (10 min), dedicated IO thread, drag-to-DAW export |
| NULL CONTRACT | Defaults null against Parallel Matrix below −80 dBFS (FreezeFrame47CompareTest) |
| STATE | Version-2 state with automatic v1 sync-index migration; 31 host-automatable parameters |
/// END OF FILE D47-003 · MODEL FF-47 · V1.28.0 · SOUND DETECTIVE ///