The new platform launches with community-built plugins, with custom instrument-building tools to follow later this year.
Lunacy has launched NOVA, a new platform designed to turn music makers’ ideas into shareable plugins, effects, and virtual instruments that work across any DAW. The first phase introduces a collection of community-created plugins, ranging from lo-fi cassette effects to unconventional virtual pianos, with tools for building and customizing plugins and instruments set to roll out later this year.
According to Lunacy co-founder and CEO Casey Kolb, the long-term goal is for NOVA to let creators build custom instruments from scratch and share them with a single link once the platform’s Builder features are fully live.
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Lunacy says NOVA is designed to move audio creation beyond the constraints of a single DAW or plugin, where users are typically limited to a developer’s preset choices and forced to share projects as files that may not be compatible with another person’s setup. Kolb described the alternative NOVA offers as ongoing and collaborative: a user might open a shared instrument, add an effect to it, and pass the updated version along to someone else to build on further.
Lunacy frames the platform as bringing music production in line with other creative fields that have already moved toward web-based, collaborative environments. The company says everything within NOVA stays synced between a user’s browser and their DAW, allowing for movement between the two without separate installs, license keys, or compatibility issues.
NOVA launches with dozens of virtual instruments, several of which are free, spanning reworked takes on traditional instruments like piano, strings, and vibraphone alongside more experimental synthesizers. Kolb described the platform’s underlying philosophy as “soft world-building”, an approach that leaves space for exploration rather than explaining every element upfront.
Available instruments include:
- Zephyr Strings (free) — a dual-layer multisampled string arp instrument built from Budapest Strings recordings, controlled via a single Intensity macro
- Good Vibes (free) — a four-velocity-layer sampled vibraphone with a Sparkle macro adding reverse delay, rotor tremolo, and granular texture
- Woodland Piano (free) — a four-dynamic-layer sampled upright piano with modeled key-release and pedal noise, plus a Wonder macro for granular delay
- Growl — a monophonic growl bass synth with dual oscillators, a 4-op FM matrix, and a resonant bandpass filter
- Gleam — a modal resonator synth with six tunable partials per voice, layered with found-object one-shots and an 11-pattern arpeggiator
- Drift Cassette — a dual-deck multisampler spanning more than 60 instrument packs, run through a rack of tape saturation, bitcrushing, and reverb
- Anima — an eight-voice phase-distortion synth with wavefolding, audio-rate feedback, and four recordable LFOs
- Swarm — a unison synth stacking up to 16 detuned voices across 16 spread modes, with built-in chord generation
- Silhouettes (free) — five synthesis and sampling engines sharing one XY-pad interface, each with its own modulated delay and reverb chain
- Chiptuner (free) — a single-oscillator chip synth with 16 waveforms and a tempo-synced arpeggiator
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