Announcing SynthMaster, a truely unique software

[effectsmaster]

Hi All,

For the past 3 months I've been working on a new software synthesizer called SynthMaster. Yesterday I finally released the beta of its LE version, which can be downloaded from http://www.kv331audio.com/synthmaste...thmasterle.msi

SynthMaster is a new synthesis engine/standalone application for Windows that uniquely combines different synthesis methods such as additive synthesis, subtractive synthesis, amplitude modulation and frequency modulation. 18 different blocks such as modulators, oscillators, filters and LFOs can be connected in different combinations to create virtually unlimited number of instruments.

The synthesis engine in SynthMaster uses 8 point interpolation for professional quality playback, and is capable of working at sampling rates upto 96k. It is highly optimized, and most of the important signal processing routines have SIMD versions (written in assembly) as well to harness the SIMD capabilities of modern processors like P3, P4, AMD Athlon, etc. It uses the CPU very efficiently, and has the capability of limiting the maximum CPU usage not to overload the operating system.

Every SynthMaster instrument has its own MIDI controllers defined and linked to its parameters. Upto 24 different controllers can be defined and each of them can be linked to upto 8 parameters. Besides, for each SynthMaster instrument there are two low frequency oscillators that can generate MIDI control change messages in real-time. Since each controller can be linked to upto 8 instrument parameters via linear transformations, this means that upto 16 instrument parameters can be modulated in real-time, each at different ranges.

After instrument voices are mixed, they go through the fx chain. Every SynthMaster instrument has 2 multimode resonant filters (with saturation), vibrato, tremolo, chorus and reverb effects. All these effects are per channel/instrument, so while you can have chorus on one channel, another channel could have flanger running (The reason I’m emphasizing this is on many sound modules chorus and reverb are common effects, their settings are global, not per channel). Besides, the reverb implementation is based on physical modeling, therefore early reflections are calculated based on the instrument position (pan & distance parameters).

SynthMaster LE at the moment does not support ReWire, although it can write its output to a 16 bit stereo WAV file. By using a virtual MIDI patch cable software such as MIDI-YOKE it can be easily connected to any DAW application and its output can be written to a WAV file and then the output can be imported to the DAW as a stereo audio track.

The current LE version allows a maximum of 8 voices and 4 instruments/channels (MIDI Channels 1-4), and its output resolution is 13 bits. Other than these limitations, it doesn’t have any other features disabled though. I will be releasing the LE version on the internet in a couple of months, and it will be freeware. Besides the LE version, there will be two commercial versions: Standart version (32 voices) and Professional version (128 voices and ReWire support)

I created a new group named synthmaster at yahoogroups, and anyone who’s interested in SynthMaster is welcome to join. I will be posting all the betas, documents, samples, presets etc etc.. on that group, and I will be collecting user feedback on how to improve the product better.

I hope SynthMaster really becomes a useful tool for every musician on the planet.

Best regards, and have fun with it!

Bulent Biyikoglu, BSEE
Audio DSP Engineer
Microsoft Certified Solution Developer

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