midi_is_cool — Preset Designers Build

Signed macOS plug-ins in AU, VST3 and CLAP, plus two standalone instruments. Tick what you want during install.

289 MB, macOS 10.13 or later, signed and notarized

Free. No account, no licence key, nothing phoning home.

Already installed it? Uninstaller (29 KB)

Install this build! It will not affect your presets in a negative way. Nothing here changes how any preset sounds — everything is additional, and your existing work opens exactly as you left it.

Notes from the designer

I've been busy making presets here along with you. Please check out what I've made, and feel free to let anything in the current preset menu spark inspiration.

I've added some new features that I wanted to see while designing sounds, and I hope it improves your designing experience like it did mine.

New — Preset Overwrite

Load a preset, make a change, hit Save. The name comes up already filled in, so one click saves over it. No retyping, no duplicate called "Harp Ensemble 2".

The preset bar: a preset menu reading Harp Ensemble, back and forward arrows, a Reset button, and a save field with the name Harp Ensemble already filled in and selected, beside Save and Cancel buttons. — The name arrives pre-filled and selected — Save overwrites, or type to make a new one.

It is the single handiest thing in this build if you iterate the way I do.

What's new in Version 2

Three areas: sound, workflow, and a redesigned panel.

Sound and performance

Sympathetic strings and Bloom on every engine. A new "All Engines" band holds Sympathetic, Bloom and Tone/Decay/Glide, in the same place on every page.
Sympathetic Key and Minor. Retune the sympathetic strings to any key, major or minor.
Glide (portamento), per voice. Off, Always or Legato — Legato slides the ringing string without re-plucking it.
Sustain pedal (CC 64), with a PEDAL light in the header showing when it's down.
Strum & Pick. Ten patterns synced to host tempo, with a P switch on each voice to choose which voices play them.
Sound Design bank, second batch. 43 presets, at the levels they were designed at.

The All Engines band, running the full width of the panel. Three groups: Sympathetic with Level and Decay knobs, Damp and Minor toggles and a row of sargam note buttons with a Key selector; Bloom with Bloom and Spread knobs; and Tone, Decay, Glide with three knobs and a Glide mode menu set to Off. — The All Engines band — in the same place on every page.

The Strum and Pick dialog for Voice 1. Strum down, up and alternating; pattern buttons including Rhythm, Roll up, Roll down, Roll up-down, Thumb and fingers, Forward roll and Tremolo; a rate row from one-quarter to one-thirty-second with 1/16 selected; and a strum time row with 1/128 selected. — Ten strum and picking patterns, locked to host tempo.

Two small indicators in the plug-in header: a PEDAL badge and a MIDI menu button with a status dot. — The PEDAL light shows when sustain (CC 64) is down.

Workflow

Preset ‹ › arrows, and save over a preset by name with a Replace check. Saves are silent.
Right-click any section to Copy, Paste or Reset it.
A proper Level fader on each voice bar, in place of the old click-arrows — plus a MIDI channel menu and Octave.
Mute and Solo per voice for split and layered setups — monitoring only, never saved.
Info mode shows one clean tooltip at a time.

A voice bar with Mute and Solo buttons, octave, level and MIDI channel controls, and an open Voice 2 Level panel showing a horizontal fader at zero decibels on a scale from minus twenty-four to plus six. — A real fader, with the scale visible, instead of nudging arrows.

New look

A redesigned panel.
Five new skins — Glass, Nebula, Aurora, Ember and Eclipse.
Ripple, a new preset icon system. It analyses your preset's own output, runs it in stereo through water, captures the ripple pattern it makes, and turns that into a custom icon. Every preset, including yours, ends up with an emblem nothing else has.

A Ripple icon, drawn from that preset's own output. No two come out alike.

The open SKIN menu listing Glass, Nebula, Aurora, Ember and Eclipse, each with a two-tone colour dot and a label reading GLASS or SHELL. Eclipse is selected. — Five skins, from the SKIN menu at the bottom left.

Notes for preset designers

Everything you need to build a pack and send it in.

Start here

Install the build above. This is the build presets should be made against, so what you design is what everyone else hears.

Vocoder Designer and KS Explorer have the deepest preset systems and the most room to explore.

Where your presets are saved

KS Explorer: ~/Library/Audio/Presets/midi_is_cool/KS Explorer/ Files end in .kspreset
Vocoder Designer: ~/Library/Audio/Presets/midi_is_cool/Vocoder Designer/ Files end in .vpre

In Finder, press Shift Command G and paste the path to jump straight there.

Installing Build 2 leaves this folder alone, and so does the uninstaller unless you explicitly tick the box that says otherwise. Your work stays put.

Naming your presets

Your initials, a space, then the preset name.

JB Glass Harmonic

Keeping to this means your work stays credited to you wherever it ends up.

Sending them in

Zip your presets and email them to midi_is_cool@yahoo.com.

Tell me which instrument they're for and how you'd like to be credited.

If you're planning something big, get in touch first — I'd rather talk through what a pack should cover than have you build fifty presets that overlap with someone else's.

Submission deadline

1 December 2026

Presets received by then are included in the release.