Kushview Element 1.1.0 is out now — a focused maintenance-and-feature release that tightens up the audio engine, improves MIDI handling across the board, and adds MTC (MIDI Time Code) generation to the Lua scripting API. If you use Element as your primary audio plugin host or run it inside a DAW as an AU/VST/VST3 plugin, there’s meaningful work here worth knowing about.
Element is an open-source, modular audio plugin host built by Kushview. It lets musicians and producers route AU, VST, VST3, LV2, and CLAP plugins into flexible signal graphs — either as a standalone application or running inside another DAW. The patch bay, graph editor, and Lua scripting engine make it a capable tool for live performance, complex effects routing, and instrument design.
The headline addition in this release is MIDI Time Code (MTC) message generation exposed through Element’s Lua scripting API, along with a working example script. This gives scripters and live performance setups a way to generate and route MTC messages directly from within Element — useful for synchronizing external gear, video software, or other MIDI-capable applications to Element’s transport.
Several MIDI-related bugs that affected reliability in real sessions have been resolved:
A regression where the number of ports could change after loading a saved project has been resolved. Sessions should now reload with their port configurations exactly as saved.
Intermittent oddities in the Plugin Graph Canvas resize behavior have been corrected, making the visual editing experience more predictable.
The underlying JUCE framework has been updated to version 8.0.13. Alongside this, Element’s integration with jBridge — a third-party commercial 32-bit plugin bridge by Ddmf — received a fix for how audioMaster is passed under JUCE 8.0.13, with improved plugin auto-loading on Windows as a result.
The script loader now produces more descriptive error messages when a Lua script fails to load, which should reduce the time spent diagnosing scripting problems.
Element now sends the correct time signature information to the JUCE playhead, which means plugins loaded inside Element that rely on playhead state for tempo sync will now receive accurate time signature data.
A local authentication option and OAuth sign-in flow with custom URL scheme registration and token exchange have been added. The preferences screen has been updated to include a wireframe authorize screen, and auth debug logging is now disabled by default (reducing log noise in production use).
The Windows CI runner has been switched to MSVC 2022, aligning the official Windows build environment with the current toolchain standard.
Two contributors made their first contributions to Element in this release:
Pre-built, signed installers for Element 1.1.0 are available now to paid supporters at kushview.net/product/element. Supporter access directly funds the development, testing, code signing, and distribution of Element. Pre-built installers for 1.1.0 will become publicly available when Element 1.2 is tagged.
The full source is available on GitHub at github.com/kushview/element and can be built from source today.
The complete list of changes is available in the CHANGELOG and on the GitHub release page.
Element is open-source software. If you find it useful, consider supporting the project at kushview.net.