Source-reactive industrial distortion for Windows.
The controls set the processing. The source determines how it reacts.
VOIDWORM follows the incoming signal instead of laying the same static distortion response over everything. Dynamics, transient shape, sustain, and spectral balance drive four parallel paths - MASS, FURNACE, ARC, and FEEDBACK - before they are recombined, welded, torn, tone-shaped, and contained.
- MASS: Fundamental weight, low-order harmonics, low-end pressure. Past the middle, SATURATION clips the lows much harder and squares them off, and HARMONICS lets that grit through.
- FURNACE: Starvation, grind, fuzz, folding, hostile midrange.
- ARC: Source-derived metallic/electrical intermodulation.
- FEEDBACK: Short bounded nonlinear recursion and unstable texture. Past the middle, RETURN wakes it up on short notes too, drives it harder and brings it forward.
At their default middle position the character controls sound exactly as before; the extra bite lives in the upper half.
SURGE and SAW are two stages after the reactor blend, side by side with WELD on the MASTER page. SURGE escalates thresholds, sag, density and compression; SAW bends the signal through a saw, square, or triangle transfer shaped by the source's own level. Each has an icon to click, a lamp that lights while it is on, and its own amount. Right-click or scroll SAW's icon to change the shape.
49 factory presets across 11 families, plus persistent user presets.
INIT · IMPACT · GRIND · MASS · FURNACE · ARC · FEEDBACK · TEAR · WELDED · COLLAPSE · EXTREME
Void Hammer, Core Breach, Iron Maw, Machine Wound, and Steel Teeth are starting points for different kinds of impact, pressure, abrasion, and failure.
Factory and user presets share one browser, matrix, and real-time search system. The interface also provides scalable workspaces, independent meter preferences, a compact input gate, and twelve faceplates.
More interface views
Twelve faceplates, selected from the dedicated appearance panel.
Name and store custom sounds directly from the preset browser.
Installs the VST3 plug-in, the Standalone application, or both.
Installs both the VST3 plug-in and Standalone application through Windows Installer.
The complete VOIDWORM.vst3 bundle for Windows x64 hosts.
Runs VOIDWORM without a DAW and includes integrated Audio/MIDI device settings, with ASIO drivers alongside Windows Audio.
Controls & signal path
INPUT (-24 to +12 dB) sets the level into the whole plugin, dry path included; the input meter shows the level after it. The input gate is stereo-linked, enabled by default, and positioned after INPUT and before dry capture, DRIVE, source analysis, and the reactor engine. BREACH cross-contaminates reactor paths; TEAR introduces post-reactor micro-fragment damage; ROT and OVERLOAD control nonlinear severity; SURGE escalates the engine dynamically, by as much as its amount sets.
Each reactor has independent amount, on/off, Solo, high-pass and low-pass boundaries, two focus bands, and path-specific character controls. WELD is the artistic nonlinear stage after recombination. SAW follows the dry/wet mix and runs at about 400 kHz internally whatever the oversampling factor, so its shapes stay clean; its latency is constant and reported whether it is on or off. LOW, MID, HIGH, RANGE, and OUTPUT shape the master signal before the dedicated final limiter.
MIX uses a latency-aligned dry path and a straight crossfade with an even taper: half the knob is half the change, with no loudness bump in the middle. Sessions and presets saved before 1.2.0 convert on load and keep their exact dry/wet balance. Oversampling supports 1X, 2X, 4X, and 8X with a separate HQ processing mode.
CPU cost
VOIDWORM runs four parallel nonlinear reactor paths, each with its own pre-EQ, at the oversampled rate. That is inherently expensive, and the oversampling factor is by far the largest influence on cost.
Measured on one core at 44.1 kHz, stereo, 128-sample blocks, all four reactors active, expressed as a share of realtime for a single instance:
| Oversampling | CPU (HQ off) | CPU (HQ on) | Approx. instances per core |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1X (default) | ~4% | ~4% | ~27 |
| 2X | ~7% | ~8% | ~14 |
| 4X | ~13% | ~15% | ~8 |
| 8X | ~24% | ~28% | ~4 |
HQ mode swaps the IIR halfband filters for linear-phase FIR ones. It adds up to about a fifth and is off by default, so it is rarely the control worth reaching for first. Stepping the oversampling factor down one notch saves considerably more.
SAW, when switched on, adds about 7.5 points of a core at any factor: it runs its own oversampling at about 400 kHz. Switched off it costs nothing.
The defaults are 1X with HQ off: the clips and folds are anti-aliased in themselves, so 1X is already cleaner than older versions were at 2X. Sessions keep the factor they were saved with. Presets deliberately preserve whatever factor you have selected rather than overriding it, so raising or lowering it is a global choice that survives preset changes.
Presets, themes & state
User presets support Save, Load, Overwrite, Rename, Delete, and Search. They are stored as versioned .voidwormpreset files under the user's application-data directory, and include SAW, SURGE's amount and INPUT; presets saved before 1.2.0 load with SAW off, SURGE at full amount and INPUT at 0 dB. Factory presets switch SAW off.
The twelve faceplates are UV STEEL, HELLFORGE STEEL, KRYPT CYAN, XENO ACID, VOID AMBER, TOXIC BRASS, PLASMA BLUE, NUCLEAR LIME, BLOOD COPPER, ASHEN GOLD, GLACIER TEAL, and RUPTURE RED. UV STEEL is the default.
Host state uses stable parameter IDs. Reactor Solo is a transient runtime control and is not restored as persistent session state.
Manual installation
Extract the VST3 package and copy the complete VOIDWORM.vst3 bundle to:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3
Rescan plug-ins in the host.
Extract the Standalone package and run VOIDWORM.exe. Audio/MIDI configuration is available from the Settings panel. With an audio interface, choose its ASIO driver there for the lowest latency; input and output on two different devices (for example an interface in and a USB headset out) run on two clocks and can glitch.
Build from source
Requirements: Windows x64, CMake 3.22+, Visual Studio 2022 with the MSVC desktop C++ toolchain, Git, and the pinned JUCE submodule.
Clone the voidworm branch together with its pinned submodules. From the repository root, run:
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\build-release.ps1Raw distributable outputs are written to:
dist/VOIDWORM.vst3
dist/VOIDWORM.exe
Built with C++17, JUCE 8.0.8, and CMake.
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
VOIDWORM original source code and original project assets are free and open-source software.
JUCE and all other third-party components retain their respective licences.
See Third-Party Notices.
Copyright © 2026 lewonn / LWNX DSP.
VOIDWORM 1.2.0 · LWNX DSP