Vember Audio Surge is now open-source

[melomood]

I shall wait for the autumn leaves with antici

pation

[baconpaul]

yeah i have a plan for modern but it requires AVX as opposed to SSE extensions (the algorithm requires double precision at one spot so we can't do SSE unison alas). I didn't build in AVX support yet since we think we would have to do CPU version switching then - while we can assume SSE2 (a 2005 era CPU) AVX is a bit harder. Still debating. Anyway so as a result modern is 3 or 4x more CPU intensive than classic, and is also about as fast as you can go without recoding for AVX

I see. In my opinion going AVX route wouldnt hurt too much users since most if not all CPUS that came out later then the late 2011 have AVX support. Im sure there will be one or two who will say that are using older then 10 year old machines, but i really doubt they are the majority.

Within 12 hours, we had two active surge users using the alpha report that their surge was broken because I turned on blanket AVX! So seems non-AVX is present [edit: i said widespread but evil gave me guff for it and he is right; but these are users active in dev so don't want to ignore them] in our user base. Makes sense, we are all three of low CPU (in some modes), free/opensource, and linux based. Lots of old hardware out there. I figured out how to do a runtime swap though which means we can just write things twice if we want to use AVX. But of course writing it twice means we will use it less.

Have some good ideas for modern though that could really help. Will probably do them in this cycle.

[Mutant]

Within 12 hours, we had two active surge users using the alpha report that their surge was broken because I turned on blanket AVX! So seems non-AVX is present [edit: i said widespread but evil gave me guff for it and he is right; but these are users active in dev so don't want to ignore them] in our user base. Makes sense, we are all three of low CPU (in some modes), free/opensource, and linux based. Lots of old hardware out there. I figured out how to do a runtime swap though which means we can just write things twice if we want to use AVX. But of course writing it twice means we will use it less.

Have some good ideas for modern though that could really help. Will probably do them in this cycle.

Maybe as an option would be the best ?
My old CPU supports AVX, but not AVX2.
The pandemic disrupted my plans to upgrade my PC, so at least 1 year until it will be current gen again...

[EvilDragon]

We're talking about just AVX, not AVX2.

[Dandruff]

I'm still running a non-AVX CPU here ...

[EvilDragon]

It'll die eventually and then your new CPU will have it

Anyways we're not gonna make AVX a hard requirement as baconpaul said above. Just gonna have to write things twice for certain things. Which is a bummer. But AVX has been out there for 10 years, people should get on with the program

[accessdune3]

yeah i have a plan for modern but it requires AVX as opposed to SSE extensions (the algorithm requires double precision at one spot so we can't do SSE unison alas). I didn't build in AVX support yet since we think we would have to do CPU version switching then - while we can assume SSE2 (a 2005 era CPU) AVX is a bit harder. Still debating. Anyway so as a result modern is 3 or 4x more CPU intensive than classic, and is also about as fast as you can go without recoding for AVX

I see. In my opinion going AVX route wouldnt hurt too much users since most if not all CPUS that came out later then the late 2011 have AVX support. Im sure there will be one or two who will say that are using older then 10 year old machines, but i really doubt they are the majority.

Within 12 hours, we had two active surge users using the alpha report that their surge was broken because I turned on blanket AVX! So seems non-AVX is present [edit: i said widespread but evil gave me guff for it and he is right; but these are users active in dev so don't want to ignore them] in our user base. Makes sense, we are all three of low CPU (in some modes), free/opensource, and linux based. Lots of old hardware out there. I figured out how to do a runtime swap though which means we can just write things twice if we want to use AVX. But of course writing it twice means we will use it less.

Have some good ideas for modern though that could really help. Will probably do them in this cycle.

Wow. How many alpha testers there are in total?

[EvilDragon]

We don't know exactly. Anyone is free to try it out, but things are VERY alpha at the moment. Surge XT is not production-stable at all.

[baconpaul]

Yeah alpha testers is “about 10”. I would not recommend trying the alpha unless you also hang out on our discord to get announcements and stuff. We will let this thread know when it is more stable. But anyone is welcome any time to help test. “Joining” the surge synth team really just means showing up, being nice, and doing stuff

On AvX yeah a two branch strategy is the way we will go. I got it working yesterday. At least the modern oscillator can go a lot faster with AVX so will code that up. May be able to do a tweak to one or two of the expensive filters too - still deciding.

[umbongo]

This is amazing stuff! Total respect to all the Surge team working on this - I don't know why I ignored this synth until today but I have been loving learning it. I will follow future progress from now on.
Cheers,
Mr Umbongo

[.jon]

I just found the MSEG, and what a great implementation it is.

[bagpipe200]

I'd be curious to know how much market penetration an open source synth like Surge has? Probably impossible to figure out as other VST synth companies don't necessarily publish data on how many units they have sold. You could probably figure out how many times Surge has been downloaded but that doesn't necessarily mean that all those copies are in use.

I suppose it doesn't really matter in the end. People will use whatever synth, or synths works best for them.

[EvilDragon]

Well, you can see our download stats here...

Not that we care about "market penetration".

[rezoneight]

Just a quick thanks to the Surge team. Finally diving into this thing with more than a cursory glance and its ridiculously deep. Wow. Great work folks!

[rezoneight]

This is amazing stuff! Total respect to all the Surge team working on this - I don't know why I ignored this synth until today but I have been loving learning it. I will follow future progress from now on.
Cheers,
Mr Umbongo

Same here. Crazy good stuff.