Minuit Solstice - new spectral synth - free 30 day trial

[minuit-am]

Really like Solstice so far. Please add a setting for pitchbend. I like +-2 semitones instead of 12. Thanks

Please add separate up and down bend ranges. I like +2/-12.

WIll take a look at pb ranges when we do MPE - seems fairly certain that's going in next.
Keep the feature requests coming everyone! We'll probably do a vote sometime.

The easiest thing for us in the next 6-8 months are features low in big UI changes or workarounds (entire new panels, relayouts etc) so do bear that in mind, but I'm open to hear anything.
(I have plenty of mostly-backend improvements I'm starting to dream up anyway through chatting to people, partial-tracking, sample windowing, concatenating multiple samples on import - just ideas!)

I'd love to see some close control over windowing. Maybe drawable window function (probably too much gui). Some phase vocoder partial tracking and pitch flattening, expanding, manipulation,etc would be huge. There are few spectral sample playback engines that really focus on letting you screw with the analysis and playback in a fun way. It might not be something that many people want but I think it would be great.

Partial tracking / manipulation will be one of the big features going into a poll eventually!

Windowing is an interesting one, what is it about the windowing you want exactly?
The only window we apply is the windowing of the FFT function? Anything other than a traditional hann/hamming window for an FFT may sound super weird. We did trial with this back in the day but really messing with the window size / function doesn't lead to super nice results like it would in a granulator... perhaps some other things around that though, better general envelope controls etc,

[Uncle E]

We highlight the position in the waveform so maybe that's a bit confusing but yes it's fully synthesised through an FFT!
If you turn the spread to 1 in static mode, then hold it over a single frame, you can hear that there are no windowing artefacts introduced - if you were to do the same in a traditional granulator (with spray and density turned to low to make the sound as "static" as possible), you'd hear an extra periodic sound which is the window around the samples, depending on the size.

Even playing the waveform in our app is actually going through the same spectral engine, this is how you can click on the waveform and move the mouse and it also stays smooth even if you freeze.

Great! Thanks for clearing that up!

[kraster]

Really like Solstice so far. Please add a setting for pitchbend. I like +-2 semitones instead of 12. Thanks

Please add separate up and down bend ranges. I like +2/-12.

WIll take a look at pb ranges when we do MPE - seems fairly certain that's going in next.
Keep the feature requests coming everyone! We'll probably do a vote sometime.

The easiest thing for us in the next 6-8 months are features low in big UI changes or workarounds (entire new panels, relayouts etc) so do bear that in mind, but I'm open to hear anything.
(I have plenty of mostly-backend improvements I'm starting to dream up anyway through chatting to people, partial-tracking, sample windowing, concatenating multiple samples on import - just ideas!)

I'd love to see some close control over windowing. Maybe drawable window function (probably too much gui). Some phase vocoder partial tracking and pitch flattening, expanding, manipulation,etc would be huge. There are few spectral sample playback engines that really focus on letting you screw with the analysis and playback in a fun way. It might not be something that many people want but I think it would be great.

Partial tracking / manipulation will be one of the big features going into a poll eventually!

Windowing is an interesting one, what is it about the windowing you want exactly?
The only window we apply is the windowing of the FFT function? Anything other than a traditional hann/hamming window for an FFT may sound super weird. We did trial with this back in the day but really messing with the window size / function doesn't lead to super nice results like it would in a granulator... perhaps some other things around that though, better general envelope controls etc,

I had another idea I'll try to explain.

A kind of step sequencer where each step value can be derived from the X,Y coordinates of the current frame.

A cell/frame sequencer if you will.

I've managed something approximating this with two M4L step sequencers controlling the X and Y coordinates respectively. It's pretty cool.

One of the reasons this is useful is because despite the grouping of the cells in a logical way sometimes you have to traverse a lot of less than ideal cells to get to where you want to go.

Another thing that would be useful I think is that each cell when triggered by being traversed could do with an envelope. I'm not talking a per cell envelope but an overall envelope that is triggered when any cell is triggered separate to the main midi envelope.

The nature of solstice is that outside note retriggering the main envelope there is very little percussive transient information. So in path mode for example once triggered the traversal is quite smooth.

Another thing I've noticed is that the reverb seems to sap gain the wetter it gets.

One of the issue I've had is that a lot of the interesting cells are far apart

[pekbro]

If you look at it from a cellular perspective, the path mode is pretty much a step sequencer no?

[minuit-am]

Really like Solstice so far. Please add a setting for pitchbend. I like +-2 semitones instead of 12. Thanks

Please add separate up and down bend ranges. I like +2/-12.

WIll take a look at pb ranges when we do MPE - seems fairly certain that's going in next.
Keep the feature requests coming everyone! We'll probably do a vote sometime.

The easiest thing for us in the next 6-8 months are features low in big UI changes or workarounds (entire new panels, relayouts etc) so do bear that in mind, but I'm open to hear anything.
(I have plenty of mostly-backend improvements I'm starting to dream up anyway through chatting to people, partial-tracking, sample windowing, concatenating multiple samples on import - just ideas!)

I'd love to see some close control over windowing. Maybe drawable window function (probably too much gui). Some phase vocoder partial tracking and pitch flattening, expanding, manipulation,etc would be huge. There are few spectral sample playback engines that really focus on letting you screw with the analysis and playback in a fun way. It might not be something that many people want but I think it would be great.

Partial tracking / manipulation will be one of the big features going into a poll eventually!

Windowing is an interesting one, what is it about the windowing you want exactly?
The only window we apply is the windowing of the FFT function? Anything other than a traditional hann/hamming window for an FFT may sound super weird. We did trial with this back in the day but really messing with the window size / function doesn't lead to super nice results like it would in a granulator... perhaps some other things around that though, better general envelope controls etc,

I had another idea I'll try to explain.

A kind of step sequencer where each step value can be derived from the X,Y coordinates of the current frame.

A cell/frame sequencer if you will.

I've managed something approximating this with two M4L step sequencers controlling the X and Y coordinates respectively. It's pretty cool.

One of the reasons this is useful is because despite the grouping of the cells in a logical way sometimes you have to traverse a lot of less than ideal cells to get to where you want to go.

Another thing that would be useful I think is that each cell when triggered by being traversed could do with an envelope. I'm not talking a per cell envelope but an overall envelope that is triggered when any cell is triggered separate to the main midi envelope.

The nature of solstice is that outside note retriggering the main envelope there is very little percussive transient information. So in path mode for example once triggered the traversal is quite smooth.

Another thing I've noticed is that the reverb seems to sap gain the wetter it gets.

One of the issue I've had is that a lot of the interesting cells are far apart

Interesting idea, I do like it, you could get a lot of extra rhythmic texture whilst holding a single note - how would you see it as interacting with cells when you have the spread up high though? Would it be applied at every single cell change? Could get messy.

Little related aside here: we actually do have a little percussive/transient secret which is that we run an onset detector during analysis. If the playhead moves over an onset-marked cell it resets the phase information (called vertical phase coherence) to preserve the transients, you should be able to hear this on really obviously percussive samples, and it's what stops sounds from sounding really spectrally blurred (like you've just run everything through paulstretch). For instance the banjo example without this would sound horrible.

[kraster]

If you look at it from a cellular perspective, the path mode is pretty much a step sequencer no?

More like an LFO/MSEG because it's continuous.

Being able to jump around frames discretely is what I'm talking about.

Although if the path had more points and you could basically turn off the intervening travel it would work.

[kraster]

Interesting idea, I do like it, you could get a lot of extra rhythmic texture whilst holding a single note - how would you see it as interacting with cells when you have the spread up high though? Would it be applied at every single cell change? Could get messy.

It could get messy but spread can get messy with any mode. It sounds great in certain contexts but can get a bit chaotic even with the current modes. (That's not a criticism but just the nature of the beast)

Little related aside here: we actually do have a little percussive/transient secret which is that we run an onset detector during analysis. If the playhead moves over an onset-marked cell it resets the phase information (called vertical phase coherence) to preserve the transients, you should be able to hear this on really obviously percussive samples, and it's what stops sounds from sounding really spectrally blurred (like you've just run everything through paulstretch). For instance the banjo example without this would sound horrible.

I've noticed that and the per cell envelope shaping is probably not needed since you can just use midi notes to trigger.

I think my point with being able to select cells discretely is to avoid what I call the "junkyard effect" where the balance between chaos and musicality is tilted too much towards chaos.

Red Timbre Audio's Graphiti has similar issues. They're different technologies (concatenative sampling) to solstice but the effects is the same.

When you traverse the map you can find a lot of happy accidents but also a lot of messiness.

I think that something like my answer to pekbro above. Same path mode but with more points and an option to have no in between cells triggered.

[Ah_Dziz]

Really like Solstice so far. Please add a setting for pitchbend. I like +-2 semitones instead of 12. Thanks

Please add separate up and down bend ranges. I like +2/-12.

WIll take a look at pb ranges when we do MPE - seems fairly certain that's going in next.
Keep the feature requests coming everyone! We'll probably do a vote sometime.

The easiest thing for us in the next 6-8 months are features low in big UI changes or workarounds (entire new panels, relayouts etc) so do bear that in mind, but I'm open to hear anything.
(I have plenty of mostly-backend improvements I'm starting to dream up anyway through chatting to people, partial-tracking, sample windowing, concatenating multiple samples on import - just ideas!)

I'd love to see some close control over windowing. Maybe drawable window function (probably too much gui). Some phase vocoder partial tracking and pitch flattening, expanding, manipulation,etc would be huge. There are few spectral sample playback engines that really focus on letting you screw with the analysis and playback in a fun way. It might not be something that many people want but I think it would be great.

Partial tracking / manipulation will be one of the big features going into a poll eventually!

Windowing is an interesting one, what is it about the windowing you want exactly?
The only window we apply is the windowing of the FFT function? Anything other than a traditional hann/hamming window for an FFT may sound super weird. We did trial with this back in the day but really messing with the window size / function doesn't lead to super nice results like it would in a granulator... perhaps some other things around that though, better general envelope controls etc,

Adding a couple relatively simple FFT processes to the playback engine would be very cool and give the whole synth a big bump in versatility. Thresholding (Spectral gate/ expander), Frequency shifting, phase randomizing (maybe with a single "amount" control, and others would be great. Having a start and end bin and 1 or 2 controls would be plenty. These algorithms are easy to implement and readily available.

[pekbro]

With all those cells you could probably do some cool stuff with pathfinding via flow networks/fields and whatnot. Timbre as a height value obstacle maybe...

[Ah_Dziz]

Legato mode that keeps the current playback on new notes. Having both legato/poly and legato mono would be useful for various things. Adsr for the filter. Ideally some freely assignable adsrs or msegs and lfos. If adding all that stuff isn't doable maybe you could make a clap version that supports poly modulation from the host. Depending on the framework that you use for development making a clap plugin could be relatively easy.

[minuit-am]

Great, some cool ideas there

Here is our main feature poll we're putting round - https://app.opinionx.co/b43706ae-cce6-4 ... 3a7b/intro

Make sure to vote on the big ones and add any little ones in there after.

Thanks!

[Uncle E]

Every option is good!

[WasteLand]

Every option is good!

i must agree, i did the poll, and well, every feature is great...

looking forward how it grows, and already enjoying it, bought it, used it...

[pekbro]

I still need to do it, tho I’m not voting for mpe, so I don’t see a lot of reason to vote, since everyone else will vote for that I’d wager. Heh

[Uncle E]

I want MPE and didn't vote for it because the other options are better.