oooo SoftwareVst

Skip the read, download the plugin here: oooo.audio.

I love the process of creating tape loops for musical performances. It provides an assymetry, it keeps things off “the grid” and avoids the hegemony of the DAW to some extent. I don’t work with physical tape loops but have been creating SuperCollider patches and norns scripts where I’ve used a simulacrum of the tape loop technique for a variety of recent albums.¹²³⁴ This plugin, called “oooo”, is the latest iteration of this idea.

oooo is a new plugin by that has been in the works for half a decade. It started as a script for monome norns called oooooo (2020), evolved into similar scripts like acrostic (2021) and ouroboros (2023) and was used in multiple SuperCollider performances (2024), and eventually a JACK client called oooooooo (2025). This style of tool has been utilized for three Infinite Digits albums: generations, at the place, and for the theatre of the flat imagination. Its part of a new album I’m working on too.

Rewrite it in X #

The most useful programs I have are the ones I keep rewriting. I’ve re-written croc in some form probably 9 or 10 times. This program, oooo, has been rewritten probably six times. Each rewrite served a goal, and the goal of this rewrite was to get the tool that I love so much in a framework that makes it cross-compatible with all my devices (macOS, Linux, Windows), with or without Ableton (JUCE enables this). I’m happy to say that this tool will work in most environments and hosts.

A DAW in the DAW #

Technically speaking, oooo is very much a digital audio workstation (a DAW). You can record loops, play them, trigger them with MIDI, and add effects to them. And to that end, while it works great standalone, it can also be used within another DAW (like Ableton, FL Studio, Reason, Logic). The cross-compatibility was always a bit of a puzzle, though, because oooo’s basic nature is to be off-the-grid, while most DAWs like to be on the grid. But it is nice to have DAW hosting, at least to utilize all the amazing effects and other plugins (like a one-bit delay, which I recently developed!).

The features #

oooo has a lot of features, and it might be best to read the documentation to become most familiar with them. However, the main feature set is not designed by committee; it’s very specific to the expectations that I have for making music. Namely: oooo works with the monome grid, it is scriptable with Lua for live coding, it is self-contained, it uses my favorite reverb algorithm, loops are always crossfaded at endpoints of jumps for clickless journeys, it can be played with a keyboard, and it is open-source (the engine is currently open, but the JUCE application will not be open-sourced until later).

I’m open to adding features too, if you have some, please reach out.

The end #

oooo is meant to be a contemplative tool. But that’s not to mean it can make a lot of fun noise when smashing on the keyboard.

Mainly, its meant to be fun and meant to make the process of making music fun and enjoyable and listen to wonderful music doing it.