A sad day for Hipno. Cycling ’74 has announced that all sales of Pluggo and Pluggo-based plug-ins will cease immediately. More information is available @ http://www.cycling74.com/story/2009/5/14/101259/594 .

If, and what, Electrotap will do with Hipno is still unclear at this point. We thank everyone who enjoyed Hipno and let us know about their love for the plug-ins. We love them too and will miss them very much!

The April issue of Recording Magazine has a review of Hipno.

Electrotap developed Hipno for Cycling ‘74 a couple of years ago, and it is gratifying to see that it still feels fresh in the otherwise muddy world of ’me too’ audio plug-ins.

It starts off with a bang in this quote:

Hipno is … developed in conjunction with the scary geniuses at audio developer Electrotap.

And later:

Once you’ve played with the Hipnoscope for a while, you get addicted. As a way of intuitively search for, finding, and playing with sounds, it has few if any competitors. And for very complicated plug-ins with many parameters, I’d argue that the Hipnoscope may be the only way of getting musical results without agonizing hours of moving faders and figuring out what each one does.

It’s great! We’re certainly honored to have such a wonderful review from Recording Magazine…

The NAMM Show kicks off today in Southern California. I’ve been out to Anaheim for it each of the last couple of years, but I’m sitting out this one. Cycling ’74 is still carrying the Hipno torch though.

I got an email from Lilli asking for 2-3 bullet-points that high-lighted a couple of plug-ins. I had consumed a large amount of coffee at the time, and was feeling a bit punchy when I put together the list. I’m not sure if she used it, but thought I’d post it here too…

HIPNO
Re-live your psychedelic dreams

• Webcam-based Theremin emulator (VTheremin)
• Get zapped by VDelay any time you move
• DrunkenSailor makes any sound disorienting

I would be interested if anyone else had some clever lists of plug-ins from Hipno with descriptions…

I was interviewed recently by Gregory Taylor for the Cycling ’74 website. The topic was the development of "Hipno"http://www.cycling74.com/products/hipno. You can find the interview here.

Last week we polished off the Universal Binary version of Hipno. You can download it from Cycling ’74 if you want to check it out.

The obvious news here is that Hipno can now be used on an Intel-based Macintosh. I have to say that it’s worth it to give that a try. The Hipnoscope is really really smooth and responsive on the new machines, the video-based plug-ins work great, and the modulator plug for using joysticks and game controllers to control the plug-ins works like it never has before.

Plug-ins are categorized in ProTools, they now work with the Clip Envelopes feature in Ableton Live (version 5.2.1 or the upcoming 6.0 recommended), and the plug-ins can now be used with Final Cut Pro and other applications which were previously problematic. This version (1.1) fixes virtually all of the known bugs with previous releases and it’s really exciting to see this release go public. We’ve been working on it for a long time.

If you do decide to update Hipno (the update is free for registered users), make sure you update all of your other Pluggo-based plug-ins too (including Pluggo and Mode). The Universal Binary version of Hipno only works with Universal Binary versions of the other packages. For Pro-Tools users, ProTools 7 or higher is required.

WooHoo! … back to having fun with all of these plug-ins!

Keyboard Magazine has published a Review of Hipno on their site.

My favorite quote from the review: “There’s nothing dry or dull here: these are blow-your-speakers out, contact-the-mothership, invent-a-new-form-of-digital-punk-rock effects.”

And another: “Where what other plug-ins do quickly becomes a known quantity, Hipno unleashes screeching timbres and grooving noise that sounds like your beatbox is hallucinating heavily.”

Very cool review indeed!

This past fall I gave two presentations at the annual Electronic Music Midwest festival. One was about Jamoma , the other about Hipno .

I’ve made my notes and slides from my presentation on Hipno available here .

Enjoy!