Doppelmangler

With a name and a gui that look like they've been pulled straight off a 2000AD comic cover, this crazy plugin makes sounds that will have you questioning your sanity...

It's not every day we come across a synthesis tool that has zombies and radiation symbols splattered across it's interface and if truth be told, Doppelmangler could have won us over with a little more. Fortunately there is a lot more to love about this wicked device. Well maybe not if you make new age music, but for those of you with a penchant for the bizarre, Doppelmangler will provide hours of thrills.
Doppelmangler is a sample mangling tool. This windows only VSTi has the ability to import your .WAV files and perform horrifying experiments upon them. Built around two main views, one primarily for effects processing, Doppelmangler sports a wealth of unusual tools that are unlikely to be found on the other synths in your plug-ins folder. There's a built-in browser for digging up would be victims from your collection of samples; these can be previewd before you drag them directly into the interface. On import of a file, Doppelmangler performas an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analysis and breaks the sound down into as many as 256 partials. We feel certain that what we are dealing with here is a variation on additive resynthesis of some sort, though Doppelmangler also makes use of the same sorts of tools as other FFT-based apps.
Tear it up
As is usually the case, breaking down a sound into it's constituent partials gives you an incredible amount of flexibility in terms of maniupulation. Doppelmangler starts things off with a selection of 20 different non-destructive 'mangle effects'. These include familiar things like vocoding, but other functions are utterly alien in nature. We particularly like the effect that 'quantises' the sample to produce strange rhthmic results. You can perform frequency shifting or produce robotic variations, among many other things. The sound designers for the BBC's new Doctor Who series should place their orders now!
Doppelmangler also excels at timestretching, pitch shifting, and all the other functions associated with FFT and additive resynthesis. You can 'draw in' how the 'Mangler' plays back a sample; this can lead to wacky sounds that constantly change pitch, playback rate, and even direction. You can also import and export bitmaps, which means you can draw or paint your sonic spectrum in a paint program. And once you've created a suitably strange timbre, it can be shuttled through the built-in distortion, chorus, phaser, and delay for further mutation.
Doppelmangler performed well in most hosts on our test machine, and it's CPU consumption was in line with other FFT apps we have used - such programs require a fairly beefy CPU. There were times that the screen redraws seemed to glitch, but it never caused us any problems. The one issue we had was with Sonar 3 and the VST adapter; we couldn't get Doppelmangler to work at all in this environment. Doppelmangler isn't for everyone, so we'd recommend you give the demo a thorough going-over before you part with cash. However, if you like your sounds to ooze mutated DNA, this could be the hunchbacked laboratory assistant of your dreams. Or nightmares.

Computer Music #76, August 2004.
http://www.computermusic.co.uk