What's New in Reverie 1.14

Until now Reverie worked exactly one way. You gave it a file, it gave you back a soundscape. Everything else was somebody else's job: recording the source, trimming it, getting the result into a session. 1.14 opens both ends of that.

Choose the part that gets stretched

This is the feature people kept asking for, in different words every time. You load a four minute take because that is what you have, but the part you actually want is eleven seconds of it. The room tone before the vocal enters. The tail of a cymbal. One breath in the middle of a field recording.

Now the source waveform has two handles. Drag them, and only that region feeds the chain. It plays back as you set it, so you hear the boundaries before you commit. It works on macOS, Windows, Linux and iPad, and it behaves the same way on all four.

The practical effect is bigger than it sounds. Extreme time stretch is very good at finding what is inside a sound and very bad at ignoring what you do not want. Feeding it a clean eleven seconds instead of four minutes of mixed material is usually the difference between a texture you keep and one you throw away.

Reverie plays inside your DAW

On iPad, Reverie now installs as an audio unit. Load Parallel Minds: Reverie in AUM, Logic or GarageBand and it appears as an instrument. Your generated textures live inside the plugin, and you play them from a keyboard: notes gate the texture in and out, so a sustained chord holds the drone and releasing it lets the tail fall away.

It follows the host. Press play and the texture follows the transport. Move the playhead and it relocates with you. Beyond that it behaves like a plugin should: searchable and sortable library, favourites, user presets, MIDI-mappable controls and parameter automation.

This is the change that alters what Reverie is. It used to be a thing you rendered from and then imported. Now it can sit in the session.

And a second plugin that records your DAW

The other audio unit is Parallel Minds: Reverie Capture, and it is an effect rather than an instrument. Drop it on any bus and it passes the audio through untouched, bit for bit. Arm it, and it also records what goes through.

It punches in when the host starts playing and out on the tail, so you do not have to catch the take by hand. The recording lands directly in Reverie's Sources inbox, ready to stretch. The loop it closes is the one people were doing manually: bounce a stem, export it, find it in Files, import it into Reverie. Now the bus is the source.

Or just record into the app

No DAW involved: the iPad app records on its own now, from the built-in microphone or from a class-compliant USB interface. You get an input picker, a stereo meter with clip indication, and a readout of how much time you have left.

When you stop, the take goes straight into the trim editor. Record a room, drag two handles over the three seconds that matter, generate. That whole loop happens without leaving the app or naming a single file.

The free tier now sounds like the paid one

Each Lite preset used to be an approximation of its Pro counterpart. They now match on style, variation and brightness: the free sound is the real sound, and only length and stretch stay capped. Dreamy Voice Lite in particular gets the actual choral chain instead of a stand-in.

A polish pass on the interface

The interface got a going-over on every platform. The most useful part of it: result cards now carry the colour of the preset that made them, so a library of thirty takes is readable at a glance instead of thirty identical grey rectangles.

One change to what comes out

The final stage of the mastering chain used to divide the whole file by its own loudest sample, which meant one stray transient decided the level of an entire thirty minute render. It is now a soft peak limiter.

That is an improvement, but it has a cost worth stating plainly: a render from 1.13 is no longer bit identical when you regenerate it in 1.14. A seed or a USeed from 1.13 still loads correctly and still restores the same chain and the same parameters. What changed is the audio those parameters produce. Files you have already exported are untouched, and nothing in your library is rewritten.

Fixes worth knowing about

Most fixes are not worth your attention. These three are.

• On Linux, Reverie crashed at startup on Wayland sessions with the proprietary NVIDIA driver, and the workaround being passed around was to disable Wayland entirely. We were bundling Wayland libraries older than a symbol the NVIDIA driver needs, so the app died before it drew a frame. It now uses the ones your system already has.
• On macOS, the generation stall and the window freeze both turned out to be the AppKit 26 update cycle rather than anything in Reverie, and are worked around.
• On iPad, quitting or reloading while a generation was running could crash the app: the engine was being destroyed with its DSP threads still going.

Also fixed: deleting a saved take stranded its session card, a saved take could not be exported a second time, playback cut out when a save completed mid listen, and a heap overflow in the spectral balance FFT buffer.