User Manual

Terrarium

A small world that never stops sounding. Weather happens in it, small things live in it, and now and then a train goes by behind the hills. You lean over it and poke things.

Plugin / VST3 + AU + Standalone 5 living layers 6 worlds Audio + MIDI + OSC out Touch-first

Quick Start

Zero to weather in under a minute:

Load Terrarium on an instrument track, or launch the standalone. It opens full-screen.
Press PLAY in the top bar, or run your DAW's transport. The world was already going; now you can hear it.
Pick a preset. The name in the middle of the top bar is the preset. CRICKET HOUR is a gentle first evening.
Grab something. Put a finger (or the mouse) on a moving shape in the big field and drag. The sound drags with you.
Let go fast. It keeps rolling. Let go slowly and it snaps back to now.
Pull the day. One finger on empty sky, dragged left, brings the evening. The bugs wake up.
Change worlds. Tap MEADOW, left of the preset, and pick DEEP. Same weather, underwater.

The looppick a preset, lean in, grab the weather, let it go, change the key when the evening wants to move, change the world when it wants to be somewhere else.

The Machine

Top bar: the NOW-line mark (settings, themes, license, about), PLAY/STOP, the world chip and the preset in the middle, the FIELD | GUIDE | MIDI/OSC view switch, and HIDE. In a host, PLAY/STOP greys out and shows the host's transport instead. The host is in charge, and Terrarium is already following.
The rail: one box per part of the world, down the left. Each is drawn live.
The field: the big picture. Everything you can grab lives here.
The scale strip: the key everything plays in, along the bottom.

HIDE takes away the rail and the strip and leaves you the field. That is the version for playing. In the standalone, the maximise button or F11 (Ctrl+Cmd+F on a Mac) toggles full screen.

The Field

The picture is time. Right is the future, the bright line is now, left already happened.

The world is drawn a few seconds ahead of the sound, so you see a raindrop before you hear it land. Rain falls from the top, the wind is the ribbon across the middle, the bugs are the small bright things, water runs along the bottom, and the orange lines at the far right are the road.

Nothing loops. It generates itself, in order, forever, from a seed. NEW WORLD (top right of the field) rolls a new one: new weather, same world.

Asideif you liked the old weather, that is a shame, and also why presets exist.

Worlds

The chip left of the preset is the world. The weather is the same in every one; what it is made of changes.

World	What the weather becomes
MEADOW	The one you know: wind, rain, insects, a brook, a distant road.
DEEP	Underwater. The wind is a current, rain is rising bubbles, the insects are a pod of shrimp, clicks and whistles, the water is a hull ringing in the key, and the road is ships and the odd passing whale.
CAVE	Underground. The wind is a breath through the passage, rain is drips that land on your scale, the insects are bats, the water is an underground river, and far off stone falls and the cave hums. Everything comes back off the walls.
HEARTH	Indoors. The wind is the fire's flame, rain is embers crackling and popping, crickets on the hearth, a kettle singing, and outside the gusts rattle the window while the storm rolls past.
ICE	Frozen. A gale over a frozen lake, icicles ringing and snow falling in clumps, a wolf pack with pups and seals under the ice, and the lake ice itself singing, every crack a falling pew. Far off the sheet cracks and booms.
RADIO	Heard through a receiver. The wind is static crackling with far-off lightning, and every strike is followed by a whistler falling down the dial. Rain is tweeks, the insects are the dawn chorus and a morse key, the water is a numbers station beeping out its melody, and the road is satellites passing overhead.

A squall in the meadow is a surge in the deep, a draught in the cave, a blaze in the hearth, a gale on the ice and a burst of static on the radio, at the same moment. The rail renames itself to match (WIND becomes CURRENT, BREATH, FLAME, GALE or STATIC), and so do the sources on the MIDI/OSC page. Your wires stay where you put them.

Tap a world and you hear the way in at once. The world itself is already coming: watch its name scroll in from the right, then the ear rushes ahead to meet it. Grabs feel heavier underwater. The world is saved with the preset, and each world's presets live in their own folder in the drawer.

Asidethe whale has three songs. It does not take requests.

Your Finger

What a touch does depends on where the TOUCH bead sits, in the bottom box of the rail.

Grip

Your finger holds the tape. Drag and the sound drags with you: backwards, forwards, slow, whatever your hand does. Let go fast and it keeps rolling; let go slowly and it snaps back to now. A second finger near the same stream loops the bit between them.

The wind is different

A held wind still blows. Hold it and the storm holds where you caught it. Push up for a gust, pull down for a lull. Catch it during thunder and the roll slows under your hand; pull down and the strike comes closer, flick it away and the rest lands at once.

Throw the wind toward the future and a front sets off from the far edge and comes for you. Throw it into the past and the storm you held races away. Two fingers on the wind loop it, and their spacing is the weather's clock: close is jittery, wide is slow and oceanic.

Empty sky

One finger drags the day. Pull left and evening comes. Two fingers hold the whole world's breath: everything stops where you caught it, except the wind, which holds. Either finger drags it all, and the last one lifting lets it spring back.

Poke

Slide TOUCH to POKE and your finger provokes the world instead. Tap the rain and a drop falls there. Bow through the wind and it gusts. Tap the bugs and they answer, usually more than you asked for. Double-tap the rain for thunder, the road for a train.

In between you get some of both, which is where most people end up.

The Rail

Each box is one part of the world. Drag the bead: right is more of the bottom caption, up is more of the top one. The thin bar on the right edge is that part's level. The hollow ring, where there is one, is a second pair of settings for the same thing.

Box	The bead	The ring
WIND	Left a breeze, right a storm (a storm brings its own thunder). Down is an open field, up puts trees in it for the gusts to rustle.	The wind's throat: how open the vowel is, and whether it howls.
RAIN	Right is a downpour. Up moves the drops higher.	A second, lower voice under the drops, and where it sits.
BUGS	Right is more of them singing at once; up makes them keener to start.	How many trill, and how fast.
WATER	Right is more flow; up makes it wander between its notes.	The octave it sings in, and how much it rings.
FAR	The road. Right is busier, up is closer. Trains are rare and take their time.
AIR	Everything leaves through here. Up puts the world in a room; right squashes it, gently at first, then not. The drawing is the actual sound on its way out.	CLIMATE, one weather for the whole world. Left calms every part of it at once, right makes it wild. Up lets the weather swing further from wherever you set it; down holds it steady. Your own beads stay where you put them; a pale hollow bead on a thread shows where each one really is.
TOUCH	GRIP to POKE (see Your Finger). WEIGHT is how heavy things feel: light snaps back, heavy keeps rolling.	FEEL: how much the thing you touch leans forward in the mix, and how much a hard flick counts for more than a soft one.

Asidethe ghost cars on the road are only there so that busier means something before the first real car turns up.

The Key

The strip along the bottom is the key everything is in. Pink keys are in the scale; teal ones are sounding right now. Rain uses the whole scale, so in A minor every white key lights up sooner or later. That is the scale working, not the scale off.

The + adds a segment. Give it another key and the world changes key when the playhead gets there: on the bar, in tune, because the future is written in the key it will play in. 16 scales.

The TUNING chip swaps the whole grid for another one: maqam, just intonation and more, 11 systems in all. Every drop and bug retunes. MIDI out stays on ordinary notes, the nearest it can find.

MIDI and OSC

MIDI/OSC is the third view in the top bar. It is where the world sends things out.

Out of the box it sends four things: the rain, the bugs, the water and the road, as MIDI notes on channels 1 to 4. A pitch and a gate for each. For most people that is the whole page.

ADD A WIRE is the rest. Pick a source (the wind, the rain, the thunder, the bugs, the water, the road, the day, your hand), pick the thing about it you want (how hard the wind blows, how close the thunder is, each strike), pick MIDI or OSC, and give it a channel and a CC, or an address. It appears as one line you can read back. Tap the line to change it, x to take it away. S solos a wire while another program learns it.

The wires are saved with the preset. The OSC address and port, behind SET UP, belong to this computer.

The trickTerrarium already knows the next five seconds. LEAD sends a wire that far ahead of the NOW line, so a light rig can flash before the thunder gets here. Your hand has no lead. The world cannot predict you.

Play, Stop and Hosts

The world runs from the moment you open it. PLAY lets it reach your ears; STOP takes it away again, and the world goes on without you.

Stopped is not dead. Grab it and you hear what you hold; let go and it zips back into silence.

In a host, the host's transport is the button: run the DAW and the world sounds, stop it and the world goes quiet but keeps living. The standalone opens stopped, so the world is on screen before it is in your speakers.

Presets, Themes and Settings

Presets

The name in the middle of the top bar is the preset. The arrows step, the name opens the drawer. A preset is a whole weather, key and wires included, but not how your finger works: TOUCH is yours and stays put.

36 ship with it. Ten are meadows: OPEN MOOR, PINE RIDGE, SQUALL LINE, DRY LIGHTNING, SOFT RAIN, CRICKET HOUR, SPRING BROOK, LEVEL CROSSING, STILL POND, HEAT HAZE. The other worlds each have a folder of their own, from KELP FOREST and BAT COLONY to FIRESIDE, WOLF NIGHT and NUMBERS STATION. Loading one takes you to its world. Save your own from the drawer. The shipped ones can be overwritten or deleted. Nobody will stop you.

Settings

The little NOW-line mark at the far left of the top bar (or the TERRARIUM name next to it) opens Settings:

Settings tab: the theme. Six of them recolour the whole world, sky and weather included: Terrarium, Dusk, Desert, Frost, Moss and Mono. The theme belongs to this computer, so loading a preset never changes it.
License tab: activate, or deactivate before you move to a new computer.
About tab: the version, and the short version of this page.

Activation

The download is the whole instrument. Until it is activated it goes quiet for a few seconds at intervals, so you can try everything before you buy.

Buy it at touchmachines.com and your license key arrives by email. Open Settings (the NOW-line mark), go to License, paste the key and press Activate. One key covers three computers. Moving house? Deactivate on the old one first. Full details: how activation works.

On iPhone and iPad, Terrarium Machine is a separate App Store app (coming soon) with nothing to activate.

Field Notes

Start in the evening. CRICKET HOUR, PLAY, then drag the day back and forth across dusk. The bugs come and go with it.
Hold the storm. In SQUALL LINE, catch the wind just as it peaks and hold it. Pull down and wait for the thunder to come closer.
A clock from weather. Two fingers on the wind, wide apart. That loop is a slow, breathing pulse; bring the fingers closer and it turns nervous.
Let it play your synths. Route the bugs to a soft pad and the rain to a pluck in your DAW. The world writes the melody; your instruments wear it.
Light show. Send the thunder over OSC with LEAD on, and the lights hit just before the sound does.
Go somewhere else. Load SQUALL LINE, then switch to RADIO. The storm is still coming; now every strike is followed by a whistler falling down the dial.

What's New

1.0.10

Ableton Live: fixed Terrarium refusing to open ("could not be opened"). Live wants an instrument to have a MIDI input, even one that ignores it; Terrarium now has one. No change to the sound.

1.0.9

CLIMATE. The AIR box has a second control: one weather for the whole world. Drag it left and every layer calms at once; right and it all goes wild. Up and down set how far the weather swings. Each layer's bead shows a pale ghost where the climate actually put it. From a listener who found calm hard to dial in.

1.0.8

Windows: fixed the field going deaf to touch and mouse after a few seconds of play (the sound and the scrolling kept going). A four-finger grab could starve the window of input; it no longer can.

1.0.7

Worlds. Five new places for the same weather: DEEP, CAVE, HEARTH, ICE and RADIO, each with its own presets.
First release on Windows and macOS.

1.0.6

iPhone and iPad: in App Store review, coming soon.