PULSEThe bottom panel
Shows the clip you selected (the piano roll, or the warp editor for audio) or the track's devices. Shift+Tab flips the pages; double-click the title to fill the window with it.
Explore Pulse
Everything in Pulse.
The full list, for when you want the detail. Everything here is in Pulse today on Windows and Mac; the features marked Pulse Online need the optional subscription.
The workspace
One panel that follows you.
Devices, inline
A track's instruments and effects in a chain. Click one and its editor opens in the panel; pin it to float it. Third-party plug-ins always float.
Arrangement and Mixer
Tab toggles the two main views. Track headers stay on the left; the inspector is a keypress away when you want it.
Explorer
Instruments, FX, Samples, Pocket and Clips in one searchable panel, with instant previews, favourites and collections.
Themes
Pulse Midnight and the other themes switch live, with an accent colour of your choice. Interface size to suit your screen.
Finding your way
A command palette, undo history, workspaces, shortcut tooltips and a short tour.
Collaboration and Pulse Online
Make music with other people.
Live sessions
Two or more people in one project at once. Notes, drum steps, tracks, the arrangement, clips, automation and the mixer travel as they change; simultaneous edits end up the same on every screen.
Presence and ghosts
See who's in the session and which view they're in, and a ghost of a note or block someone is dragging before they let go.
Play together
An opt-in shared transport: Play and Stop start and stop everyone linked at an agreed moment. Each computer plays its own copy of the song on its own engine.
Cloud and shared projects
Save projects to your account and share them with up to 20 people as editors or listeners. Their audio is uploaded once and fetched by everyone.
Chat, comments and mixes
A chat in every shared project, comments pinned to a moment in the song, and renders shared for feedback.
Friends and profiles
Add friends by @username or email, see who's online and in Pulse, keep private notes on friends, and choose who sees your profile.
Plug-in settings travel with saves rather than live, and each person needs the plug-ins installed. Sessions resume after a dropped connection; changes made offline can be shared or discarded.
Audio and timing
Audio that fits, and sounds you can reshape.
Sample analysis
Tempo, downbeat, metre, length and type — drum loop, melodic loop, vocal, one-shot, riser, pad and more — worked out in the background and cached.
Fit to the project
Warps a sample to your tempo when it's sure and places its first beat on the bar; when it isn't, it suggests a fit instead. Time modes: auto, beats, bars, seconds, free.
Warp to Grid
Quantise audio. Every attack is found to the millisecond, with a sensitivity for ghost notes, then moved onto the timeline's grid by a strength and with the project's swing.
Time Engine
Seven time-stretch algorithms — Punch, Vocal, Fluid, Clean, Pulse, Grain and Shatter — with warp markers you can drag in the editor or right on the arrangement.
Audio Editor
A sound-design workspace for every clip: time and pitch, formants, envelopes, LFOs, step and random modulation, slicing and clip effects, with A/B compare and presets.
Granular
The Grain Cloud draws the granular engine as it plays. Paint, erase, freeze, scatter, attract and repulse grains.
Stem separation
Split a mix into vocals, drums, bass and other on your own computer. Nothing is uploaded.
Pitch correction
Snap a vocal to a key and scale with adjustable speed and strength; formants are kept.
Audio to MIDI
Turn a melody, a drum part or slices into a new MIDI sequence.
Clip processing
Noise reduction, declick, normalise to peak or loudness, gain, polarity, spectral blur, freeze and reverse reverb, kept as takes.
Clip automation
Audio Editor settings that change along a clip can have their own lane on the arrangement, rendered into the clip and moving with it.
Sample browser
Keyboard navigation, instant previews, favourites and collections, background search, and a filter by file type: WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 or Ogg.
Instruments
Sixteen instruments made for Pulse.
Included with Pulse, each with its own factory presets, in the same window design as every Pulse effect.
Pulse Analog
A classic subtractive synth: three oscillators with hard sync, FM and ring modulation, a self-oscillating ladder filter, drift, chorus and delay.
Pulse Digital
A wavetable synth: two oscillators over 16 banks or your own WAV tables, warps, comb and formant filters, and its own effects.
Pulse Texture
Granular for recordings: eight built-in sources or your own sample, scanned, sprayed, frozen or reversed, in tune and without aliasing.
Pulse Atmos
Additive pads and atmospheres: up to 64 harmonics a note that morph, drift and bloom, chord stacks, and its own hall with shimmer and freeze.
Pulse Morph
A wavetable and spectral synth: two oscillators morphing between sources, built in or your own audio analysed into harmonics.
Pulse Moss
An organic polysynth: warm, breathing leads, keys and chords, with plucks, breath, tape and a 24-slot modulation matrix. 64 factory sounds.
Pulse Acid
Acid bass on the TB-303's own diode ladder, envelopes, accent and slide, or a cleaner, modern voice.
Pulse Wave
Polyphonic wavetable synth with unison up to 16 voices, wave shapers, nine filters, a modulation matrix and built-in effects.
Pulse Keys
Stage keyboard: a sampled grand, electric pianos, tonewheel organ and synths, layered or split.
Pulse Shake
Analogue bass synth: drifting oscillators, a nonlinear ladder filter and oversampled voices, with a Floor and Sub Harmonics for a clean low end.
Kick, Snare, Hi-Hat, Clap
Four drum designers: a sub with its own pitch envelope and click; body, snap and wires; noise and metal with choke; hands in bursts with humanise.
Drum Kit
Sixteen pads of samples or synthesised hits, choke groups and four factory kits.
Sampler
Multi-sampling with key and velocity zones, loops, slicing, time-stretch to tempo, envelopes and an LFO.
Everything a built-in sound has
Every parameter can be automated, MIDI-learned, put on a macro or driven by a Shaper LFO; settings and the samples you give them are saved in the project and travel live in a session.
Effects
Twenty-eight effects. One design.
Every built-in effect has factory presets, A/B, undo, in and out meters and a live picture of what it's doing, in a window that never scrolls. Every knob can be automated or put on a macro.
Compressor
Five designs — Clean, VCA, FET, Opto and Bus — with parallel mix and a sidechain high-pass.
Limiter
True-peak look-ahead limiting to a ceiling, with soft clip and stereo link.
Gate
Look-ahead that keeps the hit's attack, hysteresis against chatter, and key filters.
Clipper
Six clip shapes, oversampling up to 8x, and a ceiling it holds exactly.
Sidechain
Ducking as a proper effect: keys from any strips, pre or post fader, a key filter, Classic, Trigger or Synced, look-ahead and band ducking.
EQ
Eight bands, cuts at 12, 24 or 48 dB per octave, band solo, auto gain and a live analyser.
Filter
A performance filter with its own modulation, for sweeps and rhythms.
Resonance
A modal resonator: modes, materials and tuning that ring the sound like a body.
Rift
Multiband distortion and harmonic design, with a curve per band.
Reverb
Room, Hall, Plate, Spring, Chamber and Ambient, each its own design, with Freeze.
Delay
Nine algorithms, from Digital and Tape to Dub, Multi-Tap and Reverse, with the filters inside the feedback.
Stereo Image
Width, Mono Below, five bands of width with pan and movement, mid and side levels, a vectorscope and correlation.
Chorus
Classic, Ensemble, Dimension and Vibrato.
Flanger
Classic, Through-Zero, Tape, Jet and Stereo.
Phaser
Four to twelve stages, free or synced, with an envelope follower.
Auto Pan
Six ways to move a sound, from constant-power panning to circular and mid/side, locked to the song.
Shaper LFO
Draw a shape, step it or follow the level, then drive volume, a filter, pan or up to four other knobs.
Motion
A tempo-synced multi-effect sequencer: lanes of filter, volume, pan, stutter and more, with per-step chance and variations.
Distortion
Eight oversampled curves, level-matched so drive changes the character, not the loudness.
Saturator
Six characters: Tape, Tube, Console, Transformer, Warm and Aggressive.
Bit Crusher
Bits and rate, three ways to downsample and three to quantise, with jitter.
Lo-Fi
Ten machines, from Cassette and VHS to AM Radio and Old Sampler: wow, flutter, hiss, dust and dropouts.
Vocoder
Four filter-bank engines and a spectral one; the carrier is its own synth, noise or another track.
Shifter
Pitch shifting that can keep a voice's formants, or frequency shifting for barber-pole spirals.
Spectral
Freeze, smear, blur, shift, stretch, tilt and gate the spectrum, separate harmonics from noise, and draw on a live spectrogram.
Grain
Granular processing of a live strip: scatter, stretch and pitch the sound as a cloud.
Fracture
Live buffer manipulation: rearrange, repeat and reverse the slices of a bar on the beat.
Displace
Time-warping and mechanical sound design: move where in time the sound plays, as a performance.
Writing
From a pattern to a song.
Step sequencer
Per-step velocity, accents, rolls and chance, polymeter per track, and pattern tools such as Euclidean rhythms and fills.
Piano roll
Keys and scales, chord stamps, an arpeggiator, ghost notes and note tools. Play in from the computer keyboard or a MIDI controller.
Arrangement
A clip's name bar moves it, its body selects time and its edges trim. Layers and layer groups, markers, consolidate, make unique, and sequences up to 512 bars.
Grid
Fixed, down to 1/32 with triplets; Adaptive, following the zoom down to 1/128; or off. Snap is separate from what you see, and Shift places anything freely.
Clip launcher
Launch sequences in scenes, quantised to the bar, then copy what you played into the arrangement.
Automation
Lanes with curves for knobs, faders, macros and plug-in parameters, and tempo and time-signature changes.
Mixing
A mixer you can trust.
Mixer
Buses, groups, sends, master inserts, and a mixer channel per sample if you want one.
Sidechains and key inputs
Duck any strip from others, or feed a track into an effect as its key — the Vocoder's carrier, for example.
FX Racks and macros
Group effects into racks with macro knobs; map macros by learning, with ranges, curves and snapshots.
Delay compensation
Plug-in and effect latency is compensated across every strip, bus and the master.
Metering
Peak and RMS on one dBFS scale with hold and clip indicators.
Performance
Channels render in parallel on your processor's cores. Freeze heavy tracks.
Plug-ins
Bring your own sounds.
VST3 and CLAP
Instruments and effects in both formats, with their own editor windows, on Windows and Mac.
Safe scanning
Plug-ins are scanned in a separate process, so a faulty one can't take Pulse down.
Automation and macros
Automate any plug-in parameter or drive it from a macro. Plug-in windows have a macro bar with Automate Last and Assign to Macro.
Compatibility report
Every plug-in a project uses and whether this computer has it — installed, newer, older or missing — and, in a live session, what everyone else has.
Nothing lost
A plug-in that isn't installed plays silently and keeps its settings. Nothing is removed or replaced.
Shared projects
Projects keep each plug-in's identity and settings, never its files, so they open on any computer that has it.
Recording and MIDI
Capture the take.
Audio recording
ASIO® and WASAPI on Windows, CoreAudio on the Mac, with latency compensation, input monitoring and multi-input interfaces.
ASIO is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.Loop takes and comping
Record passes as takes and comp the best parts into one.
MIDI
MIDI keyboards with velocity and sustain, MIDI learn, count-in, and MIDI file import and export.
Projects and export
Finish, and keep everything safe.
Export
The mix or stems as WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Ogg or MP3, at the sample rate you choose, normalised to peak or loudness, with dither.
Bounce and freeze
Bounce blocks, layers or tracks to audio, and freeze heavy tracks.
Version history
Recent saves are kept as versions. Name the ones that matter, restore one, or open it as a copy.
Autosave and recovery
Autosave every minute and an offer to recover after an unexpected exit.
Templates
Start from a factory template or your own.
Updates
Pulse checks for new versions and installs them from your account, checking every download before it runs.
Pulse: Pocket
The phone app.
Record
One big record button, a live waveform, trim and name. Saved on the phone first; lossless WAV.
Sync
Uploads resume after a dropped connection; recordings appear in Pulse's browser under Pocket, grouped by Today, This Week and Older.
Listen
Send to Pocket from Pulse's Export dialog and play the mix on the phone: lock screen, Bluetooth, CarPlay, Android Auto, offline.
Windows
Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. ASIO or WASAPI audio. VST3 and CLAP plug-ins.
ASIO is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.Mac
macOS 11 or later, Apple silicon or Intel. CoreAudio. VST3 and CLAP plug-ins.
Internet
To sign in, then at least once every 14 days. Pulse Online and a connection while live for collaboration. Stem separation downloads its 84 MB model on first use.