FM8.plus

FM8 has had no meaningful feature updates in years, and its final build, v1.4.6, shipped in December 2022. Everything FM8+ adds is either something I wanted for my own music or something FM8 owners have been asking for on forums for a long time.

Arpeggiator MIDI output is probably the most requested missing feature, appearing on Reddit and forums everywhere, and something I have wanted for a long time. The morph rotate idea was my own. The morph square allows for incredible texture variations and transitions, and I wanted to ride through them with a mod wheel. I asked Native Instruments for exactly that on their old forum in 2013, complete with a diagram. Nothing came of it. Thirteen years later it felt a little surreal to implement the feature myself. The tempo and gain ideas came off a Reddit wishlist.

What changed is the tooling. FM8 is closed source, so the only way to add anything to it is to read its compiled machine code, which used to mean months of work before writing a single line. A model can now read that disassembly at a level close to the original source. The reverse engineering notes are written up on GitHub.

Next up are a GUI scale multiplier and folding these controls into FM8's own interface. If you use FM8 and there is something you have always wanted from it, check out the release thread on Native Instruments' forums.