Inear Display made the kind of plugins people keep on a list of things they’d miss. Thomas Hennebert’s catalogue was small, strange, and built around controlled destruction rather than correction. He closed the business in summer 2025, which is usually the end of the story for software this niche.
He came back in February 2026 and made the plugins donationware. This week the revival reached one of the oddest of them: Danaides 2.0, released September 19.
What Danaides does
Three effects in series, each unpleasant in its own way:
- Driller — loops and repitches tiny slices of the incoming signal
- Metalizer — a delay that isn’t behaving like a delay
- Reducer — sample-rate reduction
In front of them sits a morphing pre-filter, and around them a modulation system that’s more elaborate than the effects themselves:
- Two morphing LFOs with independent rate controls, which can blend into a single synced LFO
- Two modulation sequencers — one driving the dry/wet mix, one switching which effect is active
- Three randomizers
- MIDI support and factory presets
The sequenced effect-switching is the character of the thing. You’re not setting a sound; you’re setting a pattern of sounds that steps through itself in time, which is why it makes rhythmic material out of sustained input.
Why 2.0 exists
The original shipped in 2013 and died of 32-bit-only compatibility — a quiet, extremely common way for good software to disappear as hosts and operating systems dropped 32-bit support.
Version 2.0 is a rewritten and modernised audio engine and UI that keeps the original’s character and behaviour. It’s VST3 and AU, macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel native) and Windows, free with an optional donation.
One warning: 2.0 breaks compatibility with version 1 patches. If you have old sessions using Danaides, they will not recall. Bounce anything you care about before you replace the old build.
The donationware question
It’s worth being clear-eyed about what this model is. Donationware from a developer who has already closed once is not a support contract. If Danaides becomes load-bearing in your sessions, assume you are responsible for keeping a working build and a bounced stem of anything important.
That said, a rewritten 64-bit version of a plugin that was effectively lost, given away, is a good outcome — and if you use it, the donation is the mechanism keeping the rest of the catalogue alive.