What this domain used to be
From August 2018 until at least November 2020, sonoelements.com was the website of Sono Elements, a small independent developer of virtual instruments. The site ran on Blogger and was simple: one category, “plugins”, and one article per product. Five instruments were published there:
- eTron – seven Mellotron tape sounds (August 2018)
- Model Keys – seven modelled electric pianos (August 2018)
- SolinStrings – the six tones of the ARP Solina string machine (August 2018)
- eTron Pro – seventeen Mellotron sounds (April 2019)
- RetroByts – thirty NES, C64 and console waveforms (August 2019)
The menu also linked to About, FAQ, Privacy Policy and Contact pages. The Wayback Machine never saved them, but Common Crawl, another public web archive, recorded all four in May 2020. They were short: a two-sentence mission statement about easy-to-use, fairly priced instruments; four FAQ answers on installation, commercial use, automating parameters and currency (US dollars); a contact note pointing to the FAQ and a support email; and a general privacy policy dated 24 May 2018. Their text is not reproduced here. The pages at those addresses now describe this archive.
What happened to it
Web-archive records show the site was still online on 9 November 2020. By April 2021 the domain was serving a robots.txt file of the kind used by domain-parking services, by June 2022 the registration had expired, and from August 2022 until at least October 2025 the address showed only “buy this domain” parking pages. Links from music-technology news sites that covered the plugins led to those parking pages.
What this site is now
This is an independent archive. It restores the original page addresses, structure and look of the 2018–2020 site so that old links lead to accurate information again, and it documents what happened to each product.
It is not Sono Elements. It is not run by, endorsed by or connected to the developer. It does not sell the plugins, cannot provide support or licences, and has no access to the developer’s customers, files or email.
How the pages were made
- Text: every page was written new in November 2026. Facts such as release dates, prices, sound lists and system requirements come from the archived pages (Wayback Machine and Common Crawl), the developer’s user manuals on the Internet Archive and press coverage from 2018–2019. Each product page lists its sources.
- Images: the original logo, product art and screenshots were not reused, because no permission to reuse them is known. The illustrations and interface diagrams here were drawn for this archive and are labelled as such.
- Audio: demos are not copied. Each product page can load the developer’s own SoundCloud or Internet Archive player, but only when you click it.
- Design: the layout follows the site’s 2018–2020 Blogger theme by OddThemes (centred logo, round menu and search buttons, a single white content card over a landscape background, and a three-column grid of square post cards on the home page) using new code and artwork.
- Removed pages: addresses that cannot be honestly restored, such as an unverifiable 2019 sale page, return “410 Gone” instead of invented content.
Corrections
If you were involved with Sono Elements or have a source that corrects anything here, the contact page explains how to reach this archive.