About my Softwares and Plugins

I'm a composer, and I develop musical software and plugins for my own creative work. I'm happy to share them here — some are free, others are available for purchase.

I work on a Mac, and I do my best to provide Windows installers as well. However, please note that I cannot guarantee full functionality on Windows.

As I'm a composer rather than a professional plugin developer, I don't offer customer support for free plugins. That said, if a free plugin has a major bug, I'll do my best to fix it when reasonable.

Enjoy ! Franck

HumanizerHost (VST3)

Make your sample libraries breathe. HumanizerHost is a free VST3

instrument for macOS and possibly Windows that hosts your favourite sound libraries and writes a

musical dynamics curve — a swell, a messa di voce, a fade — onto every

sustained note, as MIDI CC, exactly fitted to each note's length. Repeated

notes never sound copy-pasted: every rendition is subtly different.

Built for notation-based workflows (Dorico, Cubase) with sample libraries

that respond to CC dynamics (VSL, Spitfire, EastWest, and others).

Largo (Franck Dansaert)

Mars (Gustav Holst)

Requirements

- macOS 11 or later — Apple Silicon and Intel (universal binary)

- A VST3 host (developed and tested with Dorico and Cubase)

- Your own VST3 instruments to host inside it

An installer for Windows is given but the VST3 has not been tested on Windows Computer.

Installation on Mac

Double-click `HumanizerHost-x.y.z.pkg` and follow the installer. The plugin

is installed for all users into:

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/HumanizerHost.vst3

The package is signed and notarized by Apple — no security warnings, no

terminal commands needed. To uninstall, simply delete that file.

Quick start

1. Insert HumanizerHost as an instrument in your DAW (eg Cubase) or notation software (eg Dorico).

2. Instrument tab → Manage plugins... → scan for your VST3 plugins

(first run only). Then Load instrument... on a slot — type a few

keywords to filter the list — and load your library. Optionally add an

insert FX (e.g. a reverb) per slot.

3. Notes tab → enable a lane, pick the CC your library responds to

(CC1 Mod Wheel or CC11 Expression, usually), choose a curve preset,

and play.

How it works — the delay is a feature

HumanizerHost delays all MIDI by an analysis window (default 5 s). That is

what lets it know each note's duration in advance, so the curve fits the

note exactly. During playback and export the delay is simply part of the

sound; while your DAW's transport is stopped, the plugin passes MIDI

straight through (Playback only, on by default), so auditioning and

entering notes feels instant.

Tips:

- Set the long-note threshold ~10% below the shortest note you want

humanized; only notes longer than it get a curve.

- Variation (per lane) randomizes each note's curve slightly — around

20–35% reads as natural playing. Exports are reproducible: rendering the

same passage gives the same performance.

- Glide smooths the CC into each new curve and is legato-aware: on

overlapping notes it pre-glides so your library's legato transitions

trigger at the right dynamics.

- The green Enabled / red Disabled button (top right of the window)

bypasses the humanizer in every instance at once for A/B comparison —

instruments and insert FX keep running.

- Save your own curve shapes with Save as preset... — they are stored

app-wide and available in every project.

Everything — hosted plugins, their state, curves, settings — is saved with

your DAW session, and offline export/render is fully supported.

Phrase humanization

The Phrase tab shapes your dynamics CC across whole musical phrases, not

just single notes. A phrase is a run of notes closer together than the

gap (default 100 ms), starting after a real silence (default 1 s).

The first note sets the reference: the CC is scaled up as the melody rises

above it and down as it falls below, and the phrase dies away to zero on

its final note — the natural give-and-take of a live player.

- Dynamics CC: the controller to shape (usually the same CC your

library uses for dynamics).

- Scale per octave: how strongly the contour follows the melody

(25% ≈ a quarter louder one octave up).

- Ignore notes below: keyswitches sit below this pitch (default C0,

American notation with middle C = C4 — e.g. `C0`, `C-1`, `F#1`). They

still play but are invisible to phrase detection.

Version History

0.4.0 — the pitch threshold becomes a global Keyswitch threshold:

notes below it still play but no longer trigger the long-note curves or

the legato pre-glide either, and they are hidden from the Monitor's note

strip. Smoother output overall: Glide now eases the combined output

(curve × phrase contour), and outside a curve the CC ramps to the

player's value instead of jumping. Variation keeps each note's start and

end exactly on the designed curve. New defaults for fresh instances:

scale per octave 70%, Variation 25%.

0.3.0 — HumanizerHost 0.3.0 adds a Monitor tab that shows, in real time, exactly what the humanizer plays: one scrolling track per monitored CC with the humanized output as a solid curve and your original playing dashed, plus a mini piano-roll of the note stream on the same timeline. A sliding window (1–30 s) and a Freeze button let you examine phrases in detail, at zero cost to the audio engine. The release also gives the plugin a branded header with logo, version and copyright, and the session-wide bypass button moved up there for a cleaner tab bar.

0.2.0 — phrase humanization: the dynamics CC follows each phrase's melodic

contour and fades on its last note, with a pitch threshold so keyswitches

don't disturb it. Session-wide bypass is now a green/red button above the

tabs; the Humanize tab is renamed *Notes*.

0.1.0 — first public release.

Credits & legal

Created by Franck Dansaert.

Made with [JUCE](https://juce.com). VST is a trademark of Steinberg Media

Technologies GmbH, registered in Europe and other countries. This product

MIT License.

This software is provided free of charge, as is, without warranty of any

kind. Back up your projects. Feedback and bug reports are welcome.