The copper bar is the rail, and it gets thinner under load — below it, the stacked meter shows who is pulling, and the park shows every channel on the machine. The bass is anchored.
Put a saturation plugin on six tracks and you get six boxes, deaf to each other. A console is not like that: every channel hangs off the same power supply, and that is where the glue comes from. Busbar is that machine. Every instance publishes how hard it is pushing, the sum makes one shared rail sag, and the saturation ceiling of every channel comes down together — while one shared clock makes them all drift in step instead of smearing against each other.
The copper bar is the rail, and it gets thinner under load — below it, the stacked meter shows who is pulling, and the park shows every channel on the machine. The bass is anchored.
Two forces are shared by every instance — and one switch decides who follows them. Out of those three things comes everything the plugin does.
Six channels, one supply. With the machine off, each channel saturates against its own fixed ceiling — six separate plugins, nothing moves together. Switch it on and the sum of what everyone draws makes the copper rail thinner, and every ceiling comes down at once. Watch the anchored VOX: it keeps loading the rail, but its ceiling does not move.
In the plugin this is the top of the window: the copper bar thins under load — it does not grow — and the stacked meter under it shows who is pulling, with your own share in the lighter tone. You watch your own track dip because of the others.
The park shows one lane per channel on the machine. Click another lane and you take that track's controls without leaving your window — a violet EDITING band tells you where you are, and the change reaches the other instance even if its window is closed. Double-click a lane to rename it, and the name travels to every other park.
Editing the bass from the vocal's window: its drive, its anchor, its share of the load — the rail callout says why.
Busbar is not a faithful emulation, and it is worth saying plainly. The shared sag exists on no hardware — outboard designers build power supplies against exactly that, and the two units we measured showed 0.000 dB of inter-channel coupling. The drift, at the setting that sounds best, is around a hundred times the spec of a tape machine. It is a deliberate effect — and that is precisely what makes it hard to copy: a plugin that models one box faithfully can never do this, because the thing being modelled refuses to.
| Formats | VST3 · Audio Unit (macOS) · CLAP |
| Platforms | Windows 10/11 x64 · Linux x86-64 · macOS 10.13+ (universal, Intel & Apple Silicon) |
| Channels | Stereo in / stereo out |
| Machine size | Up to 64 instances on one shared machine |
| Inter-instance link | Lock-free shared memory — no sidechain bus, no routing, works across plugin formats |
| Characters | 6 measured voices (HG-2, Culture Vulture, SA2RATE, RND 542, Silver Bullet, T805) + custom, level-matched |
| Oversampling | ×1 / ×4 / ×8, machine-wide |
| Presets | Machine presets (shared library, live across instances), A/B of the whole desk, global undo |
| Parameters | Automatable in VST3, AU and CLAP hosts |
| Framework | Built with iPlug2 — open-source C++ audio plugin framework |
| License | Perpetual, all your machines, free updates. Separate key from the other XeniAudio plugins. |
The demo is the full plugin — every control, every character, your settings saved with the session. The only limit is that the audio mutes for a few seconds every minute, on every instance at the same moment — because they share one machine. Put it on several tracks of a real session: that is the whole point. No sign-up required.
The Windows installer is not code-signed, so SmartScreen may say the publisher is unknown, and a brand-new installer occasionally trips an antivirus heuristic. Neither is a detection — it is a reputation score that every unsigned release starts from zero.
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\
and
C:\Program Files\Common Files\CLAP\
Nothing to do. The disk image, the installer and all three plugin bundles are signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, with the ticket stapled into the files so it works offline. The publisher shows as Tony Cuny — the legal name behind Xeni-Audio, which is what Apple puts on the certificate. Logic loads the AU with no workaround.
Launch price until September 7th — then €39. One license, all formats, all platforms, all your machines, forever.