Outsim have finally decided to shoot the horse and put it out of its misery
http://www.dsprobotics.com/SynthMaker%20Letter.pdf

very sad day that has been a long time coming!!!

Yeah, I'm not paying $800 for an upgrade.

It's not disappearing, it's just becoming integrated into a larger product.

It is disappearing unless you want to pay 800 for robotics crap or better still rent the software from them, considering their horrific record of updating synthmaker you would have to be pretty gullible to fall for either of those options

Well, it will still be a nice prototyping environment for a while at least.

so what happens to variety of sound?

The new product looks interesting, im going to be keeping my eye on it and see how it goes.

$800 might seem a bit steep for some, but it is a seriously powerful product now with the integrated Ruby language.

I am also keeping an eye on this. I currentlu use MAX 6, but this can make stand alone VST's an well as .exe

I think the monthly payment idea is OK, MAX do an accademic (year) licence- same thing - $150 bucks a year is probably only the upgrade costs (like they say) and it stays current with no initial outlay- dont like it or stop using it - stop paying!

Thwe FREE version actually looks pretty powerful anyway....

All in all, I think this looks very promising....

Nothing. He can keep on using the old version of SynthMaker "forever". Obviously things will eventually break due to operating system etc changes, but to me it seems like SynthMaker's developer hasn't been that hot on doing anything about those anyway... (Think 64 bit Windows and Mac OS-X...)

Yep. Their last update was more than a year ago... ;(

Hard to trust this company, to be honest...

I agree. This injection of funds might actually revitalize the VST creation part of the product. Let's hope they don't forget about the needs of current SM users...
By the way I'm not sure what their product does that others don't, e.g. Matlab/Simulink (www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/) or, for hardware, NI LabView (www.ni.com/labview/). They should also support Arduino hardware for low-cost projects.

isn't the consensus that synthmaker was never really taken seriously in the first place? that said, its a fact that sm never had the popularity that se had.

Actually the reality is that SM was a much better package than SE but the devs were complete idiots, SE on the other hand has started to move towards being way more like SM not only in the way it works but also the way it looks and on top of that has Jeff, who after all is said and done is not only a nice guy but somebody who changed the audio dev world forever

So, for those that don't know.

If you want a sexy glassy interface with drawn envelopes that you can drag around and you want to put together some quickly in a polished looking app. Then SM is great. It's also a fantastic prototyping tool for dsp because you don't have to click wires to change your core code.

But, if you want to push it, it gets painful quickly.

SE on the other hand looks crufty, like Reaktor's ugly step sister. But, you can create your own modules in C. So, new algorithms are not as immediate, but significantly more flexible. SE's cheap, and Jeff is a really helpful chap.

If you eventually want to ditch the VST generation tool, at least SE gives you a path to do that. You can write more and more of your code in C/C++.

I would have recommended SM for some use cases until the recent change, now I think that it's kind of pointless. I don't see them catering to the music community long term. It's unfortunate because I think that the SM community is really great. They are into sharing details of their work. This happens in the SE community as well, but, not as much. Most externals are delivered as compiled C code. There isn't quite the same culture of sharing.

Jeff seems like he's actually working 64 bit and he may get around to a mac port. If you can hang with reaktor and knobman, you can create a synth with SE.

Personally, I think that it's a pretty decent bargain.