🏛️ About the Archive

Preserving the sounds, songs, skins, tools, knowledge, and history of Single Cell Software's Caustic 3

Caustic 3 was more than a mobile music application.

It became a creative platform with its own community of musicians, sound designers, song makers, developers, and experimenters. Songs were shared. Presets and sound packs were created. Skins were designed. Tutorials were written. Techniques were discovered. Forum discussions documented years of knowledge.

Much of that material still exists—but it is scattered across old computers, backups, websites, personal collections and web archives.

The Caustic 3 Archive is an independent preservation project working to bring that material back together.

🎹 A Pocket Studio's Legacy

Caustic 3 gave musicians a complete music-making environment that could fit in a phone or tablet.

Over the years, the community built a substantial creative ecosystem around it:

🎵 Songs and .caustic projects
🎛️ Machine presets
🥁 BeatBox kits and samples
📦 Sound packs and collections
🎨 Skins and interface themes
📚 Tutorials and technical knowledge
💬 Forum discussions and community history

As websites disappear and old devices become harder to access, preserving these materials becomes increasingly important.

But preservation is not only about saving files.

It is also about preserving the community, knowledge, and history that gave those files meaning.

📚 What the Archive Preserves

The Archive is being developed around several areas of Caustic's history.

🎵 Songs

Recovered .caustic projects are examined and documented where their internal structures can be reliably identified.

Where possible, the Archive records information such as

Song and project names
BPM
Machine rosters
Embedded preset names
Sample information
Pattern and note statistics
Arrangement information
Effects and Master Rack information
Other identifiable project metadata

The original project files remain unchanged.

→ How Songs Are Organized

🎛️ Presets

Caustic presets are organised by machine and practical sound category.

Bass · Lead · Pad · Pluck · Keys · Drums/Percussion · FX · Arp · Vox · Strings · Brass · Guitar · Woodwind · Chord/Stab

Classification can use filename information, stored preset parameters, embedded sample information and machine-specific rules where supported.

The original preset files are retained while organisation and metadata are added around them.

→ How Presets Are Organised

🎨 Skins

Caustic's appearance could be customised through community-created skins and interface themes.

The Archive aims to preserve these visual creations alongside information about their names, authors and original sources where that information survives.

Skins are an important part of the history of the Caustic community — not simply cosmetic files, but evidence of how users personalised and shared their Caustic environments.

→ Download Skins

→ How Skins Are Organised

📖 History & Community

The Archive also aims to preserve the information surrounding Caustic's creative community.

This includes surviving:

Forum posts and discussions
Tutorials
Documentation
Community-created resources
Historical links and references
Credits and attribution
Information recovered from web archives

Where historical material can be connected to its original source, that context is retained.

The files tell part of the story. The community tells the rest.

🔬 Research

Some of the work behind the Archive involves understanding Caustic's files themselves.

This includes research into:

.caustic project structures
Preset formats
Machine data
Pattern and sequence data
Embedded names and resources
File relationships
Preservation and metadata extraction

Not every part of Caustic's formats is completely understood.

Evidence is preferred over assumption, and uncertainty is documented rather than hidden.

→ Explore Research

🛠️ Tools

The Archive is supported by tools built specifically for working with Caustic's files and collections.

These include utilities for:

Sorting and organising presets
Scanning and cataloguing songs
Extracting and documenting file information
Managing Caustic folders and Windows environments
Building structured collections from large, unorganised datasets

The tools are developed alongside the Archive itself, with real-world collections providing test data and feedback.

→ Explore Tools

→ Caustic Folder Icon Manager

🗃️ How the Archive Works

The goal is not simply to collect old Caustic files.

The goal is to preserve them, document them, organise them and make them accessible again.

RECOVER → PRESERVE → IDENTIFY → DEDUPLICATE → CLASSIFY → DOCUMENT → INDEX → PUBLISH

1. Recover

Find surviving material from personal collections, historical websites, web archives and other legitimate sources.

2. Preserve

Keep original source files unchanged wherever possible.

3. Identify

Determine what each file is and what information can be reliably extracted.

4. Deduplicate

Identify exact duplicates while retaining different versions or variants where their contents differ.

5. Classify

Organise songs, presets, skins and other material into useful categories.

6. Document

Record the information discovered about each item and, where possible, its original source and context.

7. Index

Create searchable inventories and metadata so collections can be understood without opening every file individually.

8. Publish

Make preserved collections available through appropriate long-term archival distribution, with Archive.org intended as the primary home for

→ downloadable collections.

🤝 Help Rebuild the Caustic Community

🤝 Get Involved with the Archive

There are almost certainly Caustic files that have not yet been recovered.

They may still be sitting on:

An old computer
A phone or tablet
An SD card
A backup drive
An archived website
A personal collection

Old songs, presets, samples, skins, tutorials and other Caustic material may represent pieces of the community's history that are currently difficult or impossible to find.

You May Have Something the Archive Doesn't

Maybe you still have an old Caustic song.

Maybe there are presets on an old hard drive.

Maybe you saved a skin, sound pack, tutorial or forum page years ago.

Those files may be part of Caustic's history — and they may no longer exist anywhere else.

If you have material that may be missing from the surviving collections, you can help preserve it.

Songs · Presets · Skins · Contributions

→ Upload Files

📦 Preserved Collections

caustic3archive.com is the project's documentation, research and community hub.

Large downloadable collections are intended to be preserved and distributed separately through Internet Archive / Archive.org, allowing the website itself to remain focused on documentation, discovery and community history.

As collections are recovered, processed and prepared for publication, this site will provide the information needed to understand what they contain and where they came from.

→ Downloads & Collections

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