development log
An installer is not an alpha
FF00 Studio gained deterministic Surge recipes, a real headless authority proof, and its first Windows setup program—without pretending packaging alone makes it ready for public use.
FF00 Studio can now be installed like a Windows application. That sentence is true, useful, and dangerously easy to overstate.
The new 0.0.1 experimental-pre-alpha package installs FF00 Master for the
current user and places the matching development Rack and worker in the per-user
VST3 location. It carries the AGPL licence, third-party notices, a build
manifest, an exact checksum, an experimental warning, and a deliberately narrow
uninstall boundary. It does not bundle Waveform, Surge XT, Ollama, models, UVR,
or anybody’s music.
It also has a proper first-test manual. The procedure begins by closing Waveform, uses a disposable project copy, explains plugin discovery, loads Surge through the Rack, connects Master, and walks through Prepare, Preview, Discard, and Apply. Recovery and uninstall are part of the same document rather than an afterthought.
Proving the semantic path without trusting a model
The more important change happened below the installer.
Master now exposes nine curated Surge directions—metallic, hollow, shorter, wider, harsher, cleaner, more movement, less transient, and heavier—at three intensities. A direction is not sent to a language model and then treated as truth. Deterministic code resolves it against the exact 2,855-parameter catalogue reported by the installed Surge XT 1.3.4 build and produces a reviewable plan of stable parameter IDs, old values, target values, and reasons.
A headless transaction exercised that path against the real Rack, external worker, and Surge host. Six actual parameters entered Preview. Discard restored the exact original plan. A second Preview followed by Apply advanced the committed graph revision from 1 to 2. Replaying the now-stale plan was rejected.
That is the authority model doing real work: prose can select a known recipe, but deterministic state and revision checks decide what may happen.
How the public download is gated
The package is unsigned. Its static contents pass validation, but the exact installed-build and uninstall smoke test was deferred while Waveform and the development Rack were active; replacing a live plugin would have broken the project’s own safety rules. The dependency/licensing inventory still calls for public-release review.
The source repository is now publicly readable on my Forgejo, and the download dialog links the exact source commit that produced the installer. It also links the checksum, build manifest, and manual. The installer link remains disabled until the visitor explicitly acknowledges that this is an unsigned, unqualified Experimental Pre-Alpha intended only for disposable project copies.
That makes the artifact available without calling it finished. The remaining gate is explicit: close the host safely, test install and uninstall, complete the licence review, and keep publishing every discovered limitation. Packaging is evidence that FF00 Studio is becoming a product. It is not permission to skip the last safety checks.
Read the updated FF00 Studio project record or open the technical architecture appendix.