I'm of the many developers suffering of the 'Made with SynthEdit' prejudging syndrome.
Around 2000, Jeff McClintock gave to the world a revolutionary programming environment devoted to music applications and SynthEdit was born.
After the beta stages, Jeff distributed it as 'Shareware' just as most single person software enterprises around.
Among the 'Shareware' version limitations the 'Export to VST' was not included so in a few years the music software scene was overwhelmed with VST Plug-Ins made with his amazing tool.
But what seemed to be good at first proved to be the opposite in the long term because SynthEdit creations around could come either from a serious professional developer (which usually bought a license to Jeff) or just any newbie willing to be googled as a 'software developer'.
Around 2004, Jeff made a very important update to the software with new building blocks to split DSP and GUI tasks so SynthEdit programmers could then optimize signal flows for better CPU consumption but also create their own control objects inside the program. The 'newbies' just did not care about that because it was too complicated and kept doing their crap the old way. The serious ones started studying the new tools and soon realized the power behind them so soon appeared a new generation of very professional 'SynthEdit' creations.
Unfortunatelly, the bad prevailed over the good and the infamous 'made with SynthEdit' tag was already born.
Some might say, OK, if you are a 'pro' why don't you program in C++, Delphi, etc. and the answer is very easy. I get my MSc in Music Information Technology from the London City University, I'm a single person trying to run a software 'company' and would not be possible for me make a huge project like 'Trans Computer Maschine' in just three months programming in C++. I purchased my license to Jeff and I'm happy with the results I get with SynthEdit, I can do everything I want, skip sequencer steps, copy/paste from patch to patch, use MIDI keyboard for toggling, make exponential response GUI controls, you just have to be creative and sometimes have lateral thinking. I know there's the drawback of not compiling for Mac but this will be solved in the future.
We must support Jeff because he is just like us, a single person going forward day by day just driven by his project.

Walter Cescato
Last edited by CMT on Wed Nov 14, 2012 12:57 am; edited 1 time in total

Don't worry about these,it's only a Mac users rant

Paragraphed a bit now, sorry I was hurry when wrote it at first...

Hey Walter, there will always be a 'tag'. People will always judge what they don't fully understand. Also - most forget that custom c++ modules can be added into SynthEdit. As far as I know - Sifft & HYDi - fall into the custom c++ category.

And your right - there is no way - any big project can be done in only 3 months. HYDi took me literally 3months and 5 days to complete, and I didn't even do any graphics (except the terrible layout ).

There are great SE creations - and some mediocre. The same goes for SynthMaker, it's dependant on the designer. Good engineers and musicians - will always use their ears to judge.


Regards
Andrew

for me the "tag" simply means "no x64 any time soon". i don't care if the plugin is synthedit or not.

64bit SE is already in Beta.

There's a lot of confussion on this matter.

Most people believe that if they are using a 64bit OS, they have to install 64bit plug-ins. NOOOOO!

You need 64bit plug-ins only if your host is a 64bit app.

But if you installed a 64bit host you probably won't be able to run 32bit plug-ins.

On the other hand the quality on the audio processing is related to the host internal processing and most hosts around still process in 32bit, even if they come from 64bit version installers. Sounds confusing but this is the true and the internal processing resolution is often mysteriously not mentioned in the documentation. Just marketing strategies: 'buy our brand new 64bit version optimized for your 64bit OS' (but still processing in 32bit).

Not sure about the latest news but I only know Sonar 64bits ready for 64bit internal processing, and has to be configured cause it's defaulted to 32bit.
Last edited by CMT on Wed Nov 14, 2012 2:22 am; edited 2 times in total

I think you are making things more complicated than they need to be...and mixing some stuff up in the process.

32-bit plugins and hosts can work at 64-bit internally, thats not what 32 vs 64 bit is about. The "bit-ness" of a plugin has absolutely nothing to do with the resolution of the audio the an application is working on.

My 32-bit Reaper in my 32-bit OS defaults to 64-bit track-mixing bit-depth. One has nothing to do with the other...

Or am i misunderstandnig you?

We are saying the same, I just corrected cause it was badly expressed.

I did not know about Reaper processing in 64bit. This is good news, I have to try it.

In c++ this is known as "float"(32bit) or "double"(64bit), sometimes also called single and double precision. And it has nothing to do with your OS. Floats are mainly used, doubles are usually used in processes that need double precision - some IIR filters(because of feedback), and main DAW mixers(because the mixer needs to sometimes add a lot of numbers together).

Andrew

this wasn't the point. i have absolutely zero confusion over this. i know i can run 32-bit apps on 64-bits. hell, i use REAPER, i can even run x86 plugins on x64 host. i know all about 64 bit OS vs 64 bit processing vs 64 bit this vs 64 bit that. i'm a programmer, i do this for a living (not music software but it's all the same under the hood).

reasons for going 64 bit-only are purely practical.
1) using 32 bit plugins in 64 bit REAPER sucks. to send commands to the host (e.g. press spacebar to start playing) you have to click somewhere outside the plugin to bring host to focus.
2) bit bridge is one more point of failure. the more complex the plugin, the more chance something will fail because it's running under a bit bridge (i've seen that a lot with Jamstix for example - behaving weirdly under bit bridge while working perfectly fine on native x86 host).

so please, keep your "x64 is the same as x86" to yourself. i know it's not. i don't want to introduce instability and inconvenience just because i have to run a few sample libraries.

glad to hear SE is going x64 though. i wish synthmaker did too (so that VoS plugins could finally go native x64).

Does x32 Reaper run the same in a 64 bit and 32 bit OS?

SynthMaker is dead. Killed by robotics...

as far as my experience goes, yes.