I’ve finally posted this after years of gestating. xynthii
If you’ve been around for a while, you may have encountered the standalone app I made in 2006, Xynthi. This was inspired by but not emulating the EMS Synthi A. It turns out that a lot of people used it, from Pita to Kevin Drumm to, well, me, and it had a pretty long life. Alas, 64-bit would finally become the rule, and the standalone no longer worked on modern machines (and never worked on Windows or Linux).
While I’ve had the code all this time, it’s from the days of .rtf files and uses a bunch of GUI classes and other stuff that is no longer relevant. Over the years, people have asked me about updating Xynthi, and it’s not like I didn’t want to. But I really only wanted to do it if I could make some kind of library in vanilla SC that would allow for building similar tools with a routing patchbay and flexible modulation. No need to add to the class library, relatively simple to distribute, not as a standalone app, but running in SC (which is, in a lot of ways, better, because you can control and modify it easily with SC code instead of treating it like just a softsynth).
So, that has happened. As far as a stable core library, there are some things that I very much want to refine, but a lot of problems seem to be solved (how to “sync” different modules, gui and MIDI learn, saving and loading presets, routing anywhere / anytime, attenuating patches, etc.). As far as the successor to Xynthi, well, there’s now xynthii, which I’ve been playing with quite a bit. It’s a super fun, nasty noise maker, rebuilt from the ground up (though I used the same reverb, because it still sounds great to me) and has some different features, a lot of UX improvement (did I mention MIDI learn?), all with the same spirit.
I’m also trying a method of installing extensions that’s as friendly as I could imagine for newbies. The built extensions are distributed in the repo, and there’s an init.scd file that should copy them to the proper place for Mac and Windows users. This is pretty experimental right now (it works for me on Windows). You can still install the extensions the traditional way, which, if you’re comfortable with that sort of thing, is probably the right way to go.
So, it’s a subtractive synth, a successor to an old piece of software from an old paradigm, but dang it still can do some wild s**t. Not to mention integrating with SC in general (check out the spectral-tracking.scd example that replaces the output with a Concat2, mixing xynthii with your input). And it gives you the building blocks to construct your own modular system with any kind of sound concept and quickly spin up a routing matrix and modulation “pod”. So, cool, right?
It has been beta tested by a few people, but it’s still early stages. Give it a run. Hopefully, you enjoy it. It’s obviously free, but if you have it in you to hit the donate button, that would really, really help right now. Thanks!
