Capicola
Firmware for Alchemy Lab (Hermetic Modular)
Open-source real-time time stretcher and pitch shifter that snaps to input transients to stay on the beat, with envelope followers and trigger outputs, built on the keyframe extrema sampling method from a DAFx26 paper.
- Distribution
- Prebuilt image you flash yourself
- License notes
- LICENSE is the GNU AGPL v3; no "or later" grant was found in the README or source headers checked.
- Source
- github.com https://github.com/heavylight-industries/capicola
- Homepage
- hermeticmodular.com https://hermeticmodular.com/modules/alchemy-lab/capicola
- time-stretch
- pitch-shift
- granular
- envelope-follower
- fx
- research
- open-source
Description
Capicola, by Heavylight Industries in collaboration with Hermetic Modular, reduces incoming audio to keyframes at its local peaks and valleys and stretches it by overlap-add between them, with pitch and time controlled separately. When a transient passes the threshold the read head jumps back to the present, so stretched audio stays aligned to the rhythm of the input. The Quality control sets how much the keyframe representation is compressed, and distortion is applied to the keyframes before interpolation. Input and output envelope followers and their triggers can modulate the knobs internally or go out on the CV jacks. The method is described in the paper "Keyframe Time Stretching via Extrema Sampling" presented at DAFx26.
Install notes
Flash from the Hermetic Modular web programmer, or download capicola.bin from the GitHub releases, hold B3 through the roughly two-second boot window to enter update mode, and flash over the front USB-C port with dfu-util. Building from source needs cmake, ninja and arm-none-eabi-gcc; the Alchemy SDK and libDaisy are git submodules.
Version history
| Version | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| v1.1.0 | 2026-10-09 | Two jacks become CV inputs by default, panel save history and load, SHIFT snap to defaults, interactive manual. |
| v1.0.0 | 2026-10-02 | First public firmware. |