BUTTERFLY
268 basses, keys and plucks
BUTTERFLY is 268 basses, keys and plucks, written in one pass and kept together as one bank. It does not come with the plugin: ASTRO installs with its own factory sounds and this is a separate file, downloaded once and imported once.
The eighteen families under it exist so that 268 sounds do not collapse into four. Each one is built on a different half of the instrument: one on the pitch drop, one on beat frequencies, one on registration, one on the six non-linearities, one on a chord loaded into the three convolvers.
Free with an FL Connect account. Taking it puts it on your account, and ASTRO unlocks it through FL Connect the way it unlocks a bought bank.
- Sounds
- 268in 3 categories
- Categories
- Bass 94Keys 90Pluck 84
- The whole file
- 857 kBsealed, as it downloads
Read out of the bank file itself when it was published, not typed here: the count, the categories and the size all come from one pass over the bank.
A few bars out of it.
Sounds out of this bank playing together. No drums, no mixing and nothing added afterwards, because the point is what the bank does on its own.
Played and bounced by the instrument’s own harness, 78 BPM. Nothing here was recorded by hand: it is a command, so it renders the same way every time.
Download it, then import it once.
BUTTERFLY is a file, not an update. It does not come with the plugin and it is not inside it: the download is 857 kB and the import is one menu item.
Sign in and take it.
BUTTERFLY costs nothing. The account is what it is put on: your banks sit under Purchases in your dashboard, and a machine you set up next year fetches the same file from the same place and unlocks it the same way.
- Download the .bank file here or from your account
- In ASTRO, right click the tube, then Banks, then Import bank
- It joins the BANKS page beside the factory sounds and your own banks
Where it sits on disk.
Banks live in one folder, one file each, next to the loose sounds that do not belong to a bank yet. Copying a bank to another machine is copying a file, and importing one twice replaces it rather than doubling it.
%APPDATA%\FL-Connect\ASTRO\Banks on Windows. What the format carries is on the ASTRO page.
It checks in with FL Connect, once.
Every bank from this shelf is sealed with a key that exists only on the server, so the file on your disk is not something the plugin can open by itself. The first time you import it, or the first time you load a sound out of it, ASTRO asks FL Connect, FL Connect asks the server, and the server checks that this account has it: bought, or taken for free.
That check lasts three months and then renews itself quietly the next time FL Connect happens to be running. In between the bank works with FL Connect shut, offline, on a render machine, at three in the morning with no internet.
The honest limit, the same one printed in the plugin’s own source: a bank you can play is a bank your machine can decrypt. What this buys is that the key is not in the binary, so taking ASTRO apart yields nothing to decrypt with, and a copy of the file on its own is inert.