jonasobermueller: Six Devices, Spectral Tools and Floating Windows
Six devices, 69,419 downloads between them, and a single maintenance pass on 6 March 2019 that touched every one of them. That is the whole public catalogue of jonasobermueller, and it splits cleanly in two directions: tools that show you something Live doesn't show you, and tools that take an FFT apart and hand you the pieces.
The through-line: look at the signal, then rebuild it
Half the catalogue is spectral processing built on Max's FFT objects \u2014 a pitch shifter, a harmoniser, and a drawable filterbank. The other half is interface work: floating windows that sit outside the device chain and give you information Live keeps hidden or buried.
Those two strands are more related than they look. Both come from the same complaint \u2014 that the host doesn't give you enough resolution on what's happening. An oscilloscope tells you what the waveform is actually doing instead of what the meter implies. A locator list tells you where your arrangement markers are without scrolling. An FFT filterbank lets you draw a spectrum rather than dial in three band knobs.
A few other things are consistent across all six. Every device is licensed Attribution, so you can use the results commercially as long as you credit. Every device is an Audio Effect, even the two that are really utilities \u2014 a common pattern for Max for Live tools that need somewhere to live in a chain. And everything except the locator tool was built against Live 9 and Max 6, which matters when you decide what to install.
jo.Floating Oscilloscope carries the catalogue
jo.Floating Oscilloscope accounts for 36,682 of the 69,419 downloads \u2014 more than every other device combined \u2014 and holds a 5/5 rating over 14 comments. It is the oldest of the six, added in September 2013, and it is the obvious first install.
The premise is simple: an adjustable oscilloscope for signal analysis, viewable either inline in the device chain or popped out into a resizable floating window. That second mode is the reason it gets used. An inline scope is a postage stamp squeezed into a device row; a floating window can be dragged onto a second monitor and left running while you work.
Concrete uses once it's on a track:
- Phase and polarity checks. Drop it after a parallel bus and watch whether the summed waveform grows or collapses.
- Kick and bass alignment. Put it on the master, resize the floating window wide, and look at whether the low-end transients are stacking or fighting.
- Clip and saturation inspection. Flat tops on the waveform tell you more than a peak meter does about what your limiter is doing.
- Synth patch design. Park it at the end of an instrument rack while you build an oscillator section, so filter and wavefolder moves become visible rather than guessed.
Leave it instantiated on a utility return or on the master and treat it as permanent session furniture.
The FFT trio: pitch, harmony, spectrum
Three devices share the same underlying approach and the same 5/5 rating, and they stack well because they expose their FFT size rather than hiding it.
jo.PitchShift is the most downloaded of the three at 16,364. It is built on Max's internal gizmo object and shifts any signal across a four-octave range, with a mono mode for lower CPU and a stereo mode when you need it, plus FFT sizes selectable from 32 all the way to 4096.
That FFT size control is the real instrument here. Small windows smear time less but mangle pitch tracking; large windows are smoother on sustained material but blur transients. Try the same drum loop at 128 and at 2048 and you get two genuinely different effects out of one device \u2014 the small setting as a grainy artefact generator, the large one as a usable octave-down layer. Routing a vocal or a sustained pad into it at 4096 is the clean use; routing a percussion loop at 64 is the destructive one.
jo.FFTHarmonizer extends the idea into chords. It adds up to four pitched voices on top of the input, each with its own pitch, panning, volume and detune, with voices switchable on and off and the FFT size adjustable. The detail that makes it practical: it automatically delays the dry signal so it lines up with the pitched voices, compensating for the latency the selected FFT size introduces. Without that you'd be nudging clips by hand every time you changed the window.
Set three voices to a triad, pan them wide, add a couple of cents of detune per voice, and you have a vocal harmoniser. Set all four to the same pitch with different detune amounts and it becomes a thickener instead.
jo.Spectral Morph is the most open-ended of the six. It is an FFT filterbank where you draw your own spectrum, or have one randomised within a range and density you define. It can retrigger a fresh random spectrum automatically and slide between them, and it stores six presets with a morph slider on the left to move between them.
Six snapshots plus a morph slider is an automation target. Draw a near-open spectrum in slot one, something comb-like in slot three, something almost closed in slot six, then automate the slider across a section. Feed it noise, a pad, or a long reverb tail \u2014 anything with broadband content for the filterbank to carve. The randomise-and-slide mode is better suited to ambient beds where you want continuous unpredictable movement without writing automation.
jo.Locators fills a gap in the arrangement
jo.Locators is the one device aimed squarely at workflow. It opens a floating window that updates automatically and lists every locator in the session, ordered by time. Click one and the playhead jumps there, respecting your global quantisation setting.
For arrangement work that's a navigation panel. For live performance it's closer to a cue list \u2014 named sections you can trigger in time rather than scrubbing the timeline. It's at 4/5 over 15 comments, the most-discussed device in the catalogue, and it's the only one carrying a version bump: 1.5, with a fix noted in the changelog, and compatibility listed for Live 10 and Max 8 rather than the Live 9 / Max 6 baseline of the others. If you are on a recent Live version, this is the one that was brought forward.
jo.Spread Delay, the outlier
jo.Spread Delay is the newest of the six and the least downloaded at 1,137, with no rating yet. It's a stereo delay whose Spread parameter widens or narrows the time offset between the left and right delay lines, described as light on CPU and designed to sit alongside Live's native delays rather than replace them. It also includes an adjustable repitch time when you change delay sizes \u2014 the tape-style smear you get when a delay time moves rather than jumps.
Use it as a width tool before a native delay, or automate the delay size with a long repitch time for pitch-bend tails. The device was tested on Ableton 9 on Mac, which is worth knowing before you build a set around it.
Where to start
Install jo.Floating Oscilloscope first, without hesitation. 36,682 downloads at 5/5 is as safe as a free utility gets, and an always-visible scope changes how you mix within a session or two.
Second pick depends on what you do. If you edit arrangements or play sets from the timeline, jo.Locators is the practical choice and the one most likely to run on a current Live install. If you work with vocals or sustained sources, go to jo.FFTHarmonizer \u2014 the dry-signal delay compensation makes it usable in a real chain rather than a toy.
Save jo.Spectral Morph for a sound design session where you have time to draw spectra and store presets. It rewards attention and does nothing useful if you just drop it on a track and expect a result.
One caveat across the board: these were built in the Live 9 / Max 6 era and last touched in March 2019. Test them in a scratch set before they end up in a live rig. If small, focused catalogues interest you, the PeterMcCulloch spotlight covers a similarly sized collection with a different emphasis, and the best-of lists are a quicker route if you're shopping by category rather than by author.