After almost two months of the Minifreak bringing joy to the studios of sound designers, Arturia has released the MiniFreak V plugin – its software counterpart.

Minifreak V is Arturia’s software emulation of the Minifreak hardware synthesizer. It utilizes the same sound engine as the hardware which now sits nicely in your DAW.

The Arturia Minifreak hit the market in mid-October. It’s built on the same concepts as the MicroFreak, but it’s polyphonic with a dramatically expanded feature set with 6-voice true polyphony, two oscillators, a three-slot multi-effects processor, and more.

It was released with the promise of a software counterpart that acts as an editor which hadn’t come to fruition until today. Now, Arturia has released the MiniFreak V for free to all Minifreak hardware users – but only hardware users.

Once a Miniffreak hardware user registers the Minifreak V software on your Arturia account, this plugin version of the Minifreak is instantly activated. And you don’t need your hardware plugged in for the software to run!

Therefore, the MiniFreak V is actually an independent software synthesizer. As an emulation of the hardware, you can take all of those creative possibilities that the hardware offers and expand them with DAW automation! If it’s on the hardware then it’s in the software version. Two multi-engine oscillators, an SEM-style filter, 2 LFOs, two envelopes, a three-slot effects engine, and more.

While you can use the MiniFreak hardware as a MIDI controller for the MiniFreak V version, you can also find the same waveforms and presets in the software, and design sounds in the plugin and transport them to the hardware and vice versa.

Though the Minifreak V software looks to be a fantastic bit of software, it’s only available for users of the hardware it emulates. It’s unclear if Arturia will release the plugin version for all other users.

Personally, I hope they do. But if they do there is a risk that the hardware version will lose sales. In any case, the Arturia MiniFreak hardware is available for $599 and the MiniFreak V is a free download for hardware users.

Synth Anatomy reports that the Minifreak V runs as a VST, VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS with Apple Silicon support and Windows.

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