Vember Audio Surge is now open-source

[esaruoho]

p.s. there also seems to be some rumors of people having gotten Surge to build on Linux, so all kinds of stuff is afoot.

awesome!!

I had the opportunity to test a Linux build (not made by me). Promising, but there are small graphics bugs and a major annoyance : most presets won't load. The first time you load a preset, it generally works, but when you want to change for another one, no way (99% of the cases).

Hi Stanlea - thanks for chiming in. Could you be more specific, however. Which DAW, which plugin format, which operating system. I'm afraid there just isn't enough information to go on with. Getting Surge to build is a good first step, getting it to work everywhere with all apps is a considerably larger step. Could you let us know which preset doesn't load - or is it just a "load first preset, then load another = nothing loaded"? Could you attach a screenshot of the small graphics bugs? What happens when you try to save a preset?

[kippertoffee]

Had a play with this last night. The zoomable interface works really nicely and makes it SO much more useable on higher resolution screens. Inspiring to see so much good work going into this.

[esaruoho]

Had a play with this last night. The zoomable interface works really nicely and makes it SO much more useable on higher resolution screens. Inspiring to see so much good work going into this.

Awesome to hear! Which OS + app did you use?

[kippertoffee]

Window 8.1, tried it in Renoise. Will try Bitwig next time.

A couple of negatives:
* Seems like the waveshaping control is bust. When it's set to "soft" the sound reduced to nothing when the amount slider is increased. I tried with the last versino from Vember and it worked OK
* The temporary values that show up when editing a value disappear very quickly; too quickly to read. Not sure if this is just a Renoise thing.

[esaruoho]

Window 8.1, tried it in Renoise. Will try Bitwig next time.

A couple of negatives:
* Seems like the waveshaping control is bust. When it's set to "soft" the sound reduced to nothing when the amount slider is increased. I tried with the last versino from Vember and it worked OK
* The temporary values that show up when editing a value disappear very quickly; too quickly to read. Not sure if this is just a Renoise thing.

Thanks for the feedback, kippertoffee!

I've logged two tickets into http://github.com/surge-synthesizer/surge/issues and let's see if we can't figure out what's going on

[kippertoffee]

Now I know where to go, I'll log any further issues I find there!

[esaruoho]

Here's a little update, we're up to 1.6beta6. Was told to post this:

If anyone has downloaded beta5 they should do this:
1. Reboot
2. Don’t run any surges after reboot
3. Install beta 6
4. Everything will then be fine

beta6 also contains several other cool changes. Like using lato consistently on all platforms; and adding scroll wheel support for editing; and having the shift/flash of popups be gone

[sbj]

Thanks for all the work that has gone into this. The scalable GUI is

Cheers

[michal.ochedowski]

I was wondering if someone could explain to me part of the Oscillator Mixer section, in particular sliders over the label RING. First one has "1x2" and the second has "2x3" underneath. It doesn't say in the manual which oscillator modulates which. I mean in the situation when I unmute only the slider "1x2", does it mean that I hear oscillator 1 being modulated by oscillator 2 ? In the same manner when I unmute slider named "2x3, does it mean that I hear oscillator 2 being modulated by oscillator 3 ? I tried to figure it out by using completely different waveforms e.g. Sine wave and Square wave. However since both signals can be heard I'm not sure what exactly is happening.

[baconpaul]

I was wondering if someone could explain to me part of the Oscillator Mixer section, in particular sliders over the label RING. First one has "1x2" and the second has "2x3" underneath.

Surge (currently) has “digital ring modulation” which is a bit different from the carrier / modulator style you might be thinking of with diodes and stuff (which you use to make Dalek voices and things).

The algorithm is really simple. The 1x2 channel really just has the output of osc1 x osc2. Similarly 2x3 is osc2 x osc3. So there’s not “which one modulating which” in this sense.

This means if you take surge and mute every track except 1x2, put a sin in osc1 with pitch set at 0 and a sin in osc2 with pitch set at, say, 7, you will get a waveform that looks like “sin(wt) * sin(1.5 * wt)” (Or whatever the exact tuning factor is for a pitch shift of 7).

The ring modulators are independently mixable so you can mix the 1x2 with the 1 and the 2 in whatever weight you want. It’s sort of like, in a DX7, if every algo also had a direct out for every oscilllator as well as the internal routing.

We’ve talked about adding different RM algos (I coded up one for my rack modules I may bring over in the future) and have talked a lot more about expanding FM algos, and that’s all on our far-future roadmap, but today the synth works as described.

We’ll add some version of this info to the manual. Hope it helps.

[michal.ochedowski]

We’ve talked about adding different RM algos (I coded up one for my rack modules I may bring over in the future) and have talked a lot more about expanding FM algos, and that’s all on our far-future roadmap, but today the synth works as described.

We’ll add some version of this info to the manual. Hope it helps.

Surge works great. Thank you for the explanation.