Last time I said there was no release date, and that it would be done when it matched. It matches. The FortyTwo 1.0.0 is out today, free, for Windows and macOS, in VST3, AU, and AAX.
For anyone who just walked in: The FortyTwo is a model of the BBE 422A (unofficial), a two-channel rack enhancer from the early '90s. Lo-Contour adds bottom end. Definition adds top end and nudges it forward in time, which is the part that makes things sound "clearer" without sounding louder. Then there's the Auto switch, the thing that differentiated the 422A from the 422. It turns the top end down when the music already has plenty.
The lights
The last thing to get right was the little row of Hi-Contour lights. They aren't a meter in any normal sense. They compare the low end of what's coming in against the high end and light red, amber, or green, and exactly when they switch isn't written down anywhere, so we pointed a camera at the front panel, played a long list of test tones through it, and fitted the plugin's lights to the video, frame by frame. Out of about fifty thousand frames, the plugin agrees with the box on roughly 98% of them. Most of the other 2% are the split second when a light is changing color.
One quirk worth knowing: the lights read the input, not the output, so they keep working with the unit in bypass. The real ones do that too.
Hear it for yourself
The product page has four short clips, toms, drum overheads, bass, and a full mix of one of my own songs, each one dry, through the real box, and through The FortyTwo with the same settings. Listen to the last two back to back. That's the whole point.
The factory presets were tuned by ear on real material, and there's a Stereo Link button (our addition, off by default) for when you want both sides to behave the same in Auto. The manual has the rest.
Already have the Six Walls Installer? It'll tell you. If not, Get It! on the product page will set you up.
Thanks for listening.