My software synthesizor

[chaz13]

Sup ya'll,

I thought I'd try my hand at programming a software synthesizor to learn a bit more about it, and surprisingly enough it's going well. It's only simple at the moment but it's fairly easy to use and I suppose you can get fairly interesting sounds from it. I understand that there's synths a billion times better out there so there's not much use for this right now, but I'm going to keep adding new features and such until it become fairly useful in some way.

I'd just like it if you can check it out so far and give me a little feedback on it, it's not great yet but it works which is a definite start!

The feature list:

-8 bit sound synthesis (will have a 16 bit option in future)
-Three oscillators working at once (Additive synthesis!)
-Fairly fast render times
-Variable sample rates
-Four wave shapes, Sine, Square, Saw and Noise
-Basic volume and frequency automation
-Simple, easy to use GUI and well documented features.
-Saving and loading project files, as well as exporting WAV's
-Wavform visualizer
-After effects (Normalizing the wave).

A screenshot: (the name and graphics and whatnot are all just placeholders at the moment, I just wanted to release to get feedback on the actual workings of it.)

[IMG]http://i52.tinypic.com/xd8h3q.jpg[/IMG]

[url="http://www.host-a.net/u/chaz13/Sting%20synth.zip"]The download link, Host-a[/url]

Thanks a lot for taking a look, any suggestions for future features would be great. :buddy:

[KmartSqrl]

I'm really interested in getting in to VST development, have any links to resources you used in the learning process?

[chaz13]

To be honest I just kind of made it up as I went and went with it.

I couldn't write the sounds into a buffer and play them instantly, so I took a slightly longer route and wrote them to a WAV and played that instead, so if you'd like to know more about doing it this way you should just check out some info on the wav file format. I imagine you won't if you wish to write a real VST, unfortuantely my program will never be able to interact with a DAW and so you have to go the extra step of exporting the sounds for use as samples.

If not, then it's just a case of creating the wave shapes however you can and adding each individual point in time together when you have more than one oscillator, and using that as the final wave form to write to the WAV. I still don't really know much, I only started this a couple of days ago just to see how well it'd work and it turned out a lot better than I imagined it could.

If you're interested, these are the main two sites I used for research:

[url]https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/422/projects/WaveFormat/[/url]

Wav format specifications.

[url]http://music.dartmouth.edu/~book/MATCpages/chap.4/4.1.intro_synth.html[/url]

Basic guide to how a synthesizor works, pretty indepth.

[OutOfPop]

No matter what I do, I get this error

ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object obj_wave:

Trying to use non-existing surface.

[chaz13]

Ah that's a bug that people with old hardware/certain graphics cards will get, I thought such a small surface wouldn't cause problems though. Oh well, I can make a fix for you, sorry for any inconveinience. I'll upload it in a while/tomorrow.

EDIT: Fixed in 18 minutes :buddy: Hopefully this should work, I've set it to use a different method automatically if the surface doesn't appear to be working. If for some reason this still mucks up let me know and I'll have to a button to manually bypass surfaces and use the other method so it works for everyone. It looks and works exactly the same without the surfaces so don't worry about it being different for you.

[url]http://www.host-a.net/u/chaz13/Sting%20synth.zip[/url]

[showtek]

First of all. It looks like shit. [img]http://www.facepunch.com/fp/ratings/cross.png[/img]

Second of all. i wont say its shit couse it actually works and it sounds great. [img]http://www.facepunch.com/fp/ratings/tick.png[/img]

Third of all. Try to use FL Studio built-in vst builder. It got more settings and is easier in design and osc's. [img]http://www.facepunch.com/fp/ratings/funny2.png[/img]''

Design: Bad[img]http://www.facepunch.com/fp/ratings/cross.png[/img]
Use: Easy[img]http://www.facepunch.com/fp/ratings/tick.png[/img]
[B]OveralSound Output:[/B] Good[img]http://www.facepunch.com/fp/ratings/tick.png[/img]

[chaz13]

It's not there to look pretty, they're placeholder graphics and if anything the looks will get more simpler if I decide to update it- The random inconsistent design in most VSTi's is horrible in my opinion, makes them a thousand times harder to use. Using a VST builder beats the point of doing this in the first place, this isn't meant to be particuarly ground breaking or useful, it's so I could learn more about how synths work.

Still, thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you liked the sounds. There's ot much interest in it so I also lost interest although I have an update with some kind of effects module and overdrive and things on my pc so I might put it out at some point, if I get bored I might turn it into a mini DAW for a bit of fun.