It’s a good test of a company’s confidence in their product when they offer a very extensive test-drive.

Audulus is brimming with confidence over Version 4 of their modular music processing app. Audulus 4 is free to use, if you use patches from the endless array of patches that users share online. That can likely keep you busy for a long time. If you want to edit or create your own, it’s $19.99 for the Mac and iOS apps. And while there is a lot to learn here, twenty bucks is a joke compared to the power of this app once you start to harness it.

What is Audulus? We need to get into the weeds to explain it. Audulus is a very flexible synthesizer programming environment. It’s a toolbox for creating your own synthesizers, sound effects, filters — anything that has to do with creation or manipulation of sound. Imagine any sound. Imagine that you can do anything you want with it. With practice you can do that with Audulus.

“Modular” means that the inputs and outputs can be connected however you want using “patches.” Back in the day and on physical synths these were actual “patch cables,” like you might seen in a very old movie when people make a phone call and an operator plugs in cable to connect any two people with a phone together. In an app like this it means you’re not limited in who you can call to just the numbers programmed into your phone. You can call anyone. It gives you the freedom to make the wrong phone calls — sound disasters that will make you wince. That’s the beauty of this and why I have really grown to love my daily sessions in Audulus.

I’m not going to lie about it though. Audulus is intimidating the first time you mess around with it. I’ve been in some really messy apps, but nothing prepared me for this. Pointing and clicking randomly — putzing around — really didn’t lead me anywhere.

But mess around for 10 minutes a day and it grows on you. Or you grow to understand how Audulus works. Audulus is built natively for the iPad and Mac (the interface is a little different for each, based on the device design, but underneath it works exactly the same). Audulus is also very visually-oriented. The code is underneath and you never see it: the patches just connect the nodes and like Macs, it “just works.”

For an app with so much power, looking at a blank canvas can be intimidating. Audulus has a very strong online community, so it’s worth it to download the app and add some of these from their forums to the Patch Browser. Patches are stored there, and the Module Browser is your drawer for those, and tabs separate the default options that come with the app vs. those you’ve downloaded or created yourself. The documentation is an afterthought when you don’t know what you’re looking for, so there are many tutorials on Audulus’ YouTube channel that give you places to get started. With time the Audulus environment becomes less scary, more fun and just plain sick.

Even if you don’t make a synth or anything, I think you can still learn a lot about the apps that you already use and get a better understanding of how sound manipulation works. We look at technology today and it feels like magic. Audulus (and a similar modular environment, Hyperion) demystify the magic and show you it isn’t magic at all, just sound science.

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