Support
Most answers are below. If yours is not, write to us. The person who wrote the plugin reads it.
- Which DAWs does it work in?
- Anything that loads a VST3 or an Audio Unit, which is nearly everything. In ARA hosts (Logic Pro 10.7 and later, Studio One, Cubase, Nuendo, Reaper, Cakewalk, Mixcraft, Samplitude, Waveform) autochoir reads the clip straight off the timeline, so there is nothing to record. In Ableton Live, FL Studio, Bitwig and other hosts without ARA, you arm the plugin and play the part through it once. It sounds identical either way.
- Logic only offers me the non-ARA version.
- Logic shows the ARA version of a plugin only in the first Audio Effect slot on the channel strip. Move autochoir to the top of the strip and the ARA version comes back. Use the Audio Unit in Logic, too. Logic does not load VST3.
- Does it work in Pro Tools?
- Not yet. Pro Tools only loads AAX, and an AAX plugin has to be signed by Avid and PACE before Pro Tools will open it. Until that is done, please do not buy it for Pro Tools.
- Does it need a GPU, or an internet connection?
- Neither. Every singer runs on your CPU, locally. Nothing you record is uploaded, and the plugin works on a machine that has never been online.
- How long does a render take?
- Roughly real time per singer on a recent laptop, and the singers render in parallel across your cores. A four-part stack of an eight-bar phrase takes a few seconds. Once rendered, playback costs almost nothing.
- Where do the singers come from?
- From inside the plugin. autochoir2 offers the twenty included singers the first time it opens, and every other pack we make is on the same sheet, free, one click to install. They live in the application support folder, shared by every DAW on the machine, and updating the plugin never re-downloads a pack. A .acpack file of your own, from the pack maker, drops onto the same sheet.
- Can I use the output commercially?
- Yes, without restriction and without royalties. We train every model ourselves and the plugin says where each voice came from. You do not have to credit anyone.
- What does early adopter mean here?
- You are buying before the launch, for less: $29 now, then $49. autochoir2 works and sounds great, but it is new, so expect a few small speed bumps. Tell us when you hit one and we'll fix it asap.
- I bought it and the email never came.
- Check the spam folder first. Download links trip filters more than they should. Your downloads page has the same links, and if neither works, write to us and we will send them by hand.
- What if autochoir2 isn’t working on my machine?
- Write to us at hi@offwhite.studio with your DAW and operating system version. Often it is something small, like a macOS or DAW update, or a plugin rescan, and we will work through it with you. The plugin has a copy-diagnostics button that helps us find the cause quickly. If, after that, there is a real reason we can’t get it running on your machine, we refund you in full, as long as you wrote within 14 days of buying. Otherwise sales are final, because a download cannot be given back. Not sure it will run? Ask before you buy.
- What are the machine requirements?
- macOS 13.4 (Ventura) or newer, on Apple silicon or Intel, or 64-bit Windows 10 or newer. 8 GB of RAM, of which a render uses about 3. autochoir2 needs 7 GB of disk for the plugin and the twenty singers, and the pack maker another 5 GB. The pack maker asks for more than the plugin on a Mac: macOS 15 (Sequoia) or newer, on Apple silicon. autochoir1 is about 1.5 GB. Both keep a cache of finished renders that trims itself at 10 GB.
- Why macOS 13.4, when the plugin used to say 11?
- Because 11 was wrong. The singers run on a machine-learning runtime that needs 13.4, and it is built into the plugin, so the plugin cannot start on anything older no matter what the installer allows. On Big Sur or Monterey, autochoir installs and then fails to appear. Most Macs that run Monterey can update to a newer macOS for free, and that is usually the whole fix. If yours can’t, or you get stuck, write to us. We are here to help.
- It installed, but my DAW cannot see it.
- Check the macOS version first: below 13.4 the plugin cannot load, and hosts report that as a validation failure or as nothing at all. In Logic, open the Plug-In Manager and rescan. A plugin that failed validation once stays failed until you tell it to try again. Otherwise it is usually the ordinary things: VST3 in ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3 and Audio Units in ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components on a Mac, a restart of the host, and on Windows a VST3 host pointed at the Common Files\VST3 folder. If none of that does it, write to us with the DAW and the OS version.
Still stuck
Tell us the DAW, the operating system and what happened. If it is a render that went wrong, the plugin has a copy-diagnostics button that saves us both a round of questions.
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