Thank you for downloading Fragment. We hope you enjoy using this plugin and that it inspires new ideas.

Introduction

Fragment includes a rolling buffer that lets you carve up to four independent fragments out of that material, and set them looping, rotating and drifting through it, each on its own schedule. It supports both live audio and imported samples, with freezing available for live input.

Every fragment — blue, green, yellow and purple — gets its own identical set of controls: how fast it cycles, its pitch, its size, stereo position and its own filter and volume. All four keep running independently and simultaneously, regardless of which one you currently have selected for editing.

We built Fragment around finding inspiration in small moments: hit freeze at any moment and the plugin locks onto whatever's currently sitting in its buffer, so you can grab a phrase, a chord or a passing bit of room sound the instant it happens and start fragmenting it into something new right away. Or drop in a sample and hear an old recording turned into something new.

Installation

Once you've downloaded the file, extract the ZIP and run the installer.

By default, the plugin is installed into:

Once installed, open your preferred DAW. Fragment is a VST3 and AU plugin, so you'll need to ensure your DAW is set up correctly to find and load the plugin. The above directories are where most DAWs expect these files to be — otherwise some hosts can't find a plugin on the machine. E.g. this is the case for FL Studio or Cubase with VST3 files.

Using Fragment

Fragment is an effect plugin, so to get started, load it into an effects slot inside your DAW.

All our plugins are designed to be quick and easy to use. Fragment is built around 4 fragments, each with its own full set of controls — let's walk through everything top to bottom.

Header & Presets

The header shows the Fragment logo and the name of your current preset. The 4 icons alongside it let you browse, save, and step through presets — the square opens your OS's file dialog to browse for a preset, the + saves your current settings as a new one, and the ‹ / › arrows step alphabetically through whatever folder your current preset lives in.

Click the SoundGhost logo in the top-right corner to see the current version number, along with links back to our website and this manual, for quick reference.

Dry / Wet

The slider at the top of the main panel blends between your untouched input (dry) and the fragmented buffer output (wet). All the way left passes your input through untouched; all the way right replaces it entirely with what the fragments are playing back.

Buffer & Freeze

Below the Dry/Wet slider sits Fragment's buffer — a constantly rolling recording of your incoming signal, shown as a waveform. buffer: 8s shows how much audio it holds at once; drag up or down on it to change the buffer length. Fragments continuously play over whatever's currently in the buffer.

Click the snowflake icon on the left to freeze the buffer — playback locks to whatever's currently captured, so you can keep fragmenting that exact piece of audio instead of it continuously being overwritten by new input. Click it again to release the freeze and let the buffer start rolling forward once more.

sync, bottom-left beneath the waveform, locks the buffer length to your DAW's tempo instead of a fixed time in seconds. clear, bottom-right, empties the buffer and starts it over.

Lock

When you freeze live audio or import a sample, a lock icon appears on the right of the waveform. Clicking it locks the currently selected fragment so it stops cycling and stays put — you can then drag that fragment across the waveform and resize it by hand.

Sample Import

Drop a sample onto the waveform to import it, or right-click the waveform to browse for one. Once loaded, fragments begin looping over the sample instead of the live buffer. Drag the left and right edges of the waveform to change the window fragments play within. Save a preset with a sample loaded and that sample is embedded in the preset, so it travels along with it.

Fragments

Overlaid on the buffer's waveform are up to 4 coloured blocks, one per fragment, each showing where in the buffer that fragment is currently reading from and how much of the buffer it's covering. A thin tick inside each block marks that fragment's live playback position as it moves.

The 4 dots below the waveform — blue, green, yellow and purple — select which fragment the controls underneath are currently editing, and highlight that fragment's block on the waveform above.

Fragment Controls

Each fragment has an identical set of 8 knobs, arranged in 2 rows of 4.

Cycle

How often the fragment re-triggers and jumps to a new, randomly chosen position in the buffer. The sync tag underneath switches Cycle from a free rate to one locked to your DAW's tempo.

Min / Max

Linked to Cycle. A linked pair of knobs setting the range of slice lengths the fragment can pull from the buffer — Min sets the shortest possible slice, Max the longest. Each new cycle picks a length somewhere between the two.

Rotate

Sets the fragment's play direction. At 0 it always plays forwards; at 1 it always plays in reverse. Anywhere in between, it randomly alternates between forwards and reverse each cycle — the further left, the more weighted towards forwards, and the further right, the more weighted towards reverse.

Wander

Slowly modulates the fragment's stereo position. Each fragment's modulation is very slightly different from the others, so the four never quite match.

Pitch

Transposes the fragment's playback pitch up or down. Shift-drag for fine control.

Filter

Shapes the tone of the fragment's output. The 3 small icons underneath pick the filter type — click one directly, no menu to open:

• High-pass — cuts away the low end, letting the higher frequencies through.
• Band-pass — keeps a band around the middle, cutting both the lows and the highs either side of it.
• Low-pass — cuts away the high end, letting the lower frequencies through.

Volume

Sets the fragment's own output level. The solo tag underneath mutes the other 3 fragments so you can hear this one on its own.

Click the ? in the bottom-left corner of the plugin at any time to jump back to this manual.

Ctrl-Click to Edit All

Ctrl-click any fragment control to edit that control on all 4 fragments at once. This also works on Lock, so you can lock every fragment in place with a single click.

Resize Plugin Window

If you wish to resize the plugin window, just drag the bottom-right corner to set your desired window size — Fragment keeps its own proportions locked as you do.

Uninstalling

If you wish to uninstall the plugin, delete the Fragment files from the following locations:

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