Digits is a phase-distortion (PD) synthesizer, loosely modeled on Casio's CZ line of hardware PD synthesizers.

The original Digits web page provides just a little information about this open-source software, mostly its history. More useful details can be found in the manual; see Original Manual below.

Digits was programmed as a VST plug-in, using programming interfaces (APIs) which have been obsolete for many years. To create an updated version of this plug-in which could be compiled to run natively on Apple Silicon Macs, it was necessary to rebuild it very substantially, using https://juce.com instead of the old, proprietary Steinberg APIs. The new Digits is functionally identical to the old one, but with a few GUI changes.

The updated Digits source-code will soon be available at https://github.com/pluginguru/DigitsVst. At the time of writing, it still needs a bit of clean-up to be ready for publication.

The original Digits manual (PDF file) can be found at:

• /Applications/Digits on a Mac, or
• C:\Users\Public\Documents\Extent of the Jam\Digits on a Windows PC

Also inside these folders, you will find a sub-folder called Presets, which is important to know, as it is where you must save any new Digits presets you create; see below.

The most immediately obvious change is that the background color is now grey, rather than yellow:

All of the knob and slider controls work as before, but all the selector controls (black box with white text) no longer work as pop-up menus, but instead work as follows:

• Left-click the box to advance to the next selection in the list
• Right-click to go back to the previous selection
• OR, use the mouse-wheel to scroll forward and back in the list
• In all cases, the list itself is circular, so advancing past the end returns to the beginning.

The other major difference is that a simple preset-browser has been added. The name of the currently-loaded preset is displayed in the wide rectangular box to the left of the “Digits” logo at the bottom of the GUI. Clicking on this box opens the preset browser, which looks like this:

Digits presets are organized into banks. The list of banks is displayed on the left. Clicking on a bank selects that bank, and the list on the right changes to show the presets available in that bank. Clicking on any preset name selects that preset, and the new sound can be played immediately. Click the Close button at the top-right corner to return to the main Digits GUI.

After using the main GUI controls to create a new sound, you can open the browser again and click the Save Patch… button to save it. A standard file-save dialog will appear, initially positioned to the folder which contains all of the Digits preset files. The screenshot below shows what this looks like on a PC running Windows 10. The situation for Mac is a bit different; see below.

You'll notice that this top-level folder contains only sub-folders, one per bank. If you want to create a new bank to put your new preset in, you can simply add a new folder, giving it whatever name you want for your bank. Make sure to navigate down into one of the bank folders first, before saving your preset. Digits preset files have the extension .fxp, which will be added automatically. The name of the preset file (minus the .fxp extension) becomes the new patch name.

On Macintosh computers, the file-save dialog which pops up when you hit the Save As… button will NOT be initially positioned to the correct folder. You MUST manually navigate to the correct folder, whose path is /Applications/Digits/Presets. Once you have done so, you may optionally create a new bank folder there, navigate into your chosen bank folder, then save your new patch.

We hope to correct this issue in a future update.