Vember Audio Surge is now open-source

[baconpaul]

I'm getting a warning about the default skin not being installed, although it looks fine to me. I tried to rescan for skins from the menu but I get even more warnings. Plus, I don't see a dark skin installed.

I installed the AU. Should I also install the VST to get the skins working properly?

Screenshot 2020-07-28 at 22.03.56.png

This means your application support/surge data is incorrect. Can you attach a screenshot of "help/about"? And when you ran the installer, did it successfully install /Library/Application Support/Surge and does that directory contain skins?

I should improve that error message too.

[baconpaul]

so, there is no longer a VST 2 version?

There is no long a binary distribution of VST2. More information here: https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/formats

[onerob]

I'm getting a warning about the default skin not being installed, although it looks fine to me. I tried to rescan for skins from the menu but I get even more warnings. Plus, I don't see a dark skin installed.

I installed the AU. Should I also install the VST to get the skins working properly?

Screenshot 2020-07-28 at 22.03.56.png

This means your application support/surge data is incorrect. Can you attach a screenshot of "help/about"? And when you ran the installer, did it successfully install /Library/Application Support/Surge and does that directory contain skins?

I should improve that error message too.

Here's the About panel. I've found skins, including the dark skin, installed at /Library/Application Support/Surge.

about.png

Screenshot 2020-07-28 at 23.47.20.png

[baconpaul]

I'm getting a warning about the default skin not being installed, although it looks fine to me. I tried to rescan for skins from the menu but I get even more warnings. Plus, I don't see a dark skin installed.

I installed the AU. Should I also install the VST to get the skins working properly?

Screenshot 2020-07-28 at 22.03.56.png

This means your application support/surge data is incorrect. Can you attach a screenshot of "help/about"? And when you ran the installer, did it successfully install /Library/Application Support/Surge and does that directory contain skins?

I should improve that error message too.

Here's the About panel. I've found skins, including the dark skin, installed at /Library/Application Support/Surge.


about.png


Screenshot 2020-07-28 at 23.47.20.png

You seem to have a local copy of the application settings which will indeed blow you up. Remove or rename the directory “/Users/(redacted)/Library/Application Support/Surge” in preference of the one in /Library and it should all work.

[onerob]

I'm getting a warning about the default skin not being installed, although it looks fine to me. I tried to rescan for skins from the menu but I get even more warnings. Plus, I don't see a dark skin installed.

I installed the AU. Should I also install the VST to get the skins working properly?

Screenshot 2020-07-28 at 22.03.56.png

This means your application support/surge data is incorrect. Can you attach a screenshot of "help/about"? And when you ran the installer, did it successfully install /Library/Application Support/Surge and does that directory contain skins?

I should improve that error message too.

Here's the About panel. I've found skins, including the dark skin, installed at /Library/Application Support/Surge.


about.png


Screenshot 2020-07-28 at 23.47.20.png

You seem to have a local copy of the application settings which will indeed blow you up. Remove or rename the directory “/Users/(redacted)/Library/Application Support/Surge” in preference of the one in /Library and it should all work.

Thanks. I trashed it and that's fixed it.

[baconpaul]

Is there a specific reason that macos minimum version is now 10.12 instead of 10.11? Seems my MacBook is now out of the game.

OK @phazed there was a specific reason; but I have worked around it. (The details are pretty dull but right now we compile on windows 32 and 64 with vs2017 and 19, mac, 2 linux intels, and a linux arm so getting the compiler flags right is "tricky").

Anyway I pushed a change which uses C++-14 on mac and therefore can back down all the way to OS 10.9; and keeps windows and the other stuff working.

That should be up in the nightly build in about 30 minutes. https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/nightly

And it will be included in 1.7.1, which depending on other feedback and stuff we will ship soon-ish.

But I don't have mac hardware with an OS that old. Can you do us a favor, grab the nightly, let us know if it works on your system. A couple of the bugs we found today came from our move to CMake and associated compiler changes, and while I think I got everything set up for 10.9 / c++-14, a verification would be great.

Thank you.

[phazed]

@baconpaul: I installed the nightly on macos 10.11 and everything seems to run fine. Both VST3 and AU show up in Live and even the 1.6.6 VST2 is still working. Thanks for your good work!

[glokraw]

Thanks much for the dark skin! Very easy on the eyes
Here it is beeboppin' in Ubuntu Studio 19.10

Surge-dark-skin.png

[L-EctroBit]

Any word about virus warnings reported by few people here in this thread yesterday. We all know that almost always this warnings are false positive, but it would be good the developers take a look to stay sure and say something here to the users to know (specially the Windows ones).

Anyway, thanks for the updates and for the great job with Surge. The dark skin looks nice. Cheers.

[baconpaul]

On the virus warnings:

1. You can review the entirety of the code, the contents, and the build process on our GitHub
2. The binary distributions are built on a fresh microsoft-provided never-before-used windows VM which is created for each build
3. The only process between the source code and the binary is compile, run innosetup, and upload to GitHub
4. The binary assets (the patches) are only loaded by surge
5. (Of course, but for completeness) the code we have used as a starting point has been reviewed and is not a virus.

Again, since the tool is open source, you can personally review each of these facts to determine they are true.

Not sure why your AV tools are flagging surge. I'm a mac user. But if there is a virus in surge, it is because a clean microsoft image or GitHub upload function were compromised. I think this is incredibly unlikely. By far the most likely explanation is false positives.

But if you are still worried, you don't have to use our binary. The compilers to build surge are free. Grab the source code and build your own copy. Then you can be sure the image was created from source in a virus free environment.

Best

[L-EctroBit]

Thanks for the detailed clarification. I really appreciate it.
As I told you before, you are doing a great job with Surge and nobody questions your professionalism and dedication. Keep the good work and congrats to all the Surge team.

[baconpaul]

Thanks for the detailed clarification. I really appreciate it.
As I told you before, you are doing a great job with Surge and nobody questions your professionalism and dedication. Keep the good work and congrats to all the Surge team.

No problem at all - and I didn’t take your question as questioning anything at all! Thanks for the kind words.

But a quick editorial: the fact that we can give this answer is one of the big differences between closed source freeware and open source software. Over at the surge synth team we kinda have the pattern for “run an open source synth” project working pretty well so if you or your friends have a synth where they would like to open source it (like Claes did with surge 2 years ago - which is why we are here today!) feel free to hit us up for collaboration or help.

[Guenon]

Thank you very much for all the effort on this (in my opinion the best) totally free synth!

A quick question also: among the fresh binaries, the .deb package depends on libxcb-util1. What's the recommended procedure when installing on non-Ubuntu systems that don't have this specific libxcb version in their repositories?

For example, on plain Debian (Buster) and distributions based on it (MX etc...) there's libxcb-util0 instead of 1. Surge installation is interrupted, then, as there's no readily available repository to get the required one from. What's the most reasonable way of going about this, if not sporting Ubuntu?

[Gone soft]

Wow, your labour of love is so so appreciated I can assure you! You keep coming up with stuff beyond what I ever hoped Surge would do, now 16 unison and so much goodness in the Sine osc and the sweet new FX after all the amazing imrovements and expanded capabilites we've allready been given...

[baconpaul]

Thank you very much for all the effort on this (in my opinion the best) totally free synth!

A quick question also: among the fresh binaries, the .deb package depends on libxcb-util1. What's the recommended procedure when installing on non-Ubuntu systems that don't have this specific libxcb version in their repositories?

Thank you for the kind words!

The xcb-util1 vs 0 thing is such a pain. The synth builds against either but we have to pick one at binary time.

For now buster (and raspbian too when we build on the Pi) we recommend that you just build from source. On linux this is a matter of a checkout and a couple of commands. Easy as pie. The other option is to statically link xcb in our pipeline but that has proven prohibitive for several obvious reasons.