Milan Digital Audio (MDA) today announced the launch of Hauptwerk VIII v8.0.0.148, the next major release of their Hauptwerk VPO software.

Major changes include:

• A new integrated touch menu has been implemented.
• Ranks’ audio can now optionally be routed directly to primary mixer buses, instead of via groups (Advanced Edition only) avoiding the need to set up (or use) groups if routing ranks to individual speaker pairs.
• In addition to the existing 128 audio ‘mixer presets’ (which aren’t organ-specific, but each organ specified which of them it would use), Hauptwerk now has 4 per-organ ‘rank routing/voicing presets’.
• Audio mixer presets may now be named, as may rank routing/voicing presets.
• Several new MIDI output LCD panel line formats have been added.
• The Hauptwerk’s polyphony management system has been reworked to efficiently distribute the load of the audio engine across CPU cores that have different (or varying) performances, such as CPUs with ‘performance’ and ‘efficiency’ cores.
• Sample set loading times from cache should be faster than with any previous version. On recent computers with high-performance CPUs and NVMe SSDs times are typically 30-40% faster than v7.
• The ‘medium‘ audio engine processing quality mode has been removed.
• Novation Launchpad X (mark 3 model) support has been added.

Although the advertising on the Hauptwerk website may suggest otherwise, Hauptwerk VIII does not yet run natively on Apple Silicon processors. It is currently still running in the Rosetta 2 compatibility layer.

The Hauptwerk Release Notice, also located in the Hauptwerk Virtual Pipe Organ/Documentation folder, contains a comprehensive list of all new features and fixed bugs.

The installers for macOS and Windows can be downloaded from the Hauptwerk website.