Dust Color

Vintage Tone Designer

A free VST3 / AU / Standalone plugin that layers six analogue-style degradation modules — Noise, Wobble, Distort, Digital, Space, and Magnetic — behind one global Magnitude macro. Skeuomorphic, hand-tuned, and built to feel like real hardware.

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Heads up: this is an independent hobby project, built and maintained in spare time. A significant part of the DSP and UI code was written with AI pair-programming (Claude) rather than by hand line-by-line. It's an ongoing work in progress — expect rough edges, and expect things to keep changing. Bug reports, ideas, and pull requests are very welcome.

Six Modules, One Magnitude

Every module can run on its own, but the global Magnitude macro scales all six together — turn one knob to go from "barely there" to "completely wrecked".

Noise

Vinyl, tape, VHS, cassette and ambient hiss beds with tone shaping and level-following ducking.

Wobble

Wow & flutter pitch instability via a modulated fractional delay line.

Distort

Five waveshapers — tube, tape, crunch, fuzz, digital — with real oversampling and a live scope.

Digital

Bitcrusher and sample-rate reducer for 8-bit, 12-bit, 4-bit, and sample & hold grit.

Space

A short, metallic Schroeder reverb for spring-box and plate-style ambience.

Magnetic

Tape wear, saturation, and random dropouts, with an optional stereo-independent mode.

Under the Hood

Built with JUCE 8 (C++20), designed as a literal, pixel-faithful port of a skeuomorphic hardware-rack mockup.

Input Gain → [Noise Pre] → Wobble → Distort → Digital → Space → Magnetic
→ [Noise Post] → Tone EQ (Bass/Mid/Treble/Tilt) → Width → Master Mix → Output Gain

Every DSP module implements a common ModuleProcessor interface — the processing chain depends only on that abstraction, so adding a module is one new class.
Parameters are read lock-free via atomics; audible ones are smoothed to avoid zipper noise.
Real-time FFT spectrum scope, live Tone EQ curve, and 1x/2x/4x oversampling on Distort.

Interface

A fixed 1260×951 design canvas scales uniformly with the window, so proportions never distort — resizable from 50% to 200%, remembering the last size used. Every knob, texture, and gradient is a literal translation of the original CSS mockup: procedural grain, brushed-metal streaks, and inset shadows rendered straight from JUCE, no bitmap skins.

Presets live behind an on-demand popover — search, categorized factory bank, and your own saved presets.

Get Dust Color

Prebuilt installers are published automatically on every release. They're unsigned — this is a free hobby project, not a codesigned commercial release.

macOS

Download the .pkg from the latest release. It installs the VST3 and AU to the system plugin folders and the Standalone app to Applications.

Gatekeeper will flag it as unidentified — right-click the installer → Open.

⬇ Download for macOS

Windows

Download the .exe installer from the latest release. It installs the VST3 to the shared VST3 folder and the Standalone app to Program Files.

SmartScreen may warn on first run — click More info → Run anyway.

⬇ Download for Windows

Build from source

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --config Release

Requires CMake ≥ 3.22 and a C++20 compiler. See the README for details.