New Free Open Source Synth, Terrain, By Aaron Anderson

[Andreya_Autumn]

I would love to support the microtuning crowd! I know about microtonality from a music theory perspective, but I have no idea where to start from a technical perspective. Do you or anyone else have some links I can dive in to on this? What features are needed?

If you're on discord feel free to join the Surge Synth Team server. We've got a tuning channel there and are always happy to help out, like Wasteland said above.

But long story short, there's two standards we feel are worth supporting. Both are useful for different things, but if you wanna start with one I'd recommend MTS-ESP. All the docs you need are here:
https://github.com/ODDSound/MTS-ESP/blo ... TSClient.h
If you get to implementation step 4 in that comment, you're hanging with the best of'em basically.

Feel free to ask here or in the Surge server if you have any questions. We've done this a number of times now and can help with examples etc. Or just testing things.

[aaron_anderson]

Frankly I just forgot to implement the pitch modulation - I've added that to my to-do list.

Thank you, looking forward to the next version (and saving up for Apple silicon to run it)

Intel Mac builds are high on my priority list! The issue is that I don't have an Intel Mac to test or build on; I'm trying to compile on an M1 to deploy on x86 architecture - Apple really likes to make backwards compatibility difficult/impossible. That being said I may even have this done by the end of the day today.

That being said - you can always just build it! It's not as scary as it may sound; I have detailed steps in the ReadMe: https://github.com/aaronaanderson/Terrain

Hey, don't sweat it, Mr. Anderson! The M4 Macs are supposedly being released in early November, and I guess a lot of us oldtimers with Intel machines are looking to jump on those. Then we can unleash your creation with unlimited polyphony... no?

Intel build is now live! MacOS version 10.14 or later - tested on Intel with Reaper and Garage Band. Updated link is now in the youtube description - please let me know if it works on your machine and what OS you run. Thanks!

[aaron_anderson]

I'm looking forward to playing with this.
Will you provide download links if there are updates?
Here?
Or maybe on the github page?
Thanks

At the moment, while I put out all the MacOS fires, the most recent links for version 1.0.2 installers are on the description of the youtube page:
The youtube comments have been great resource for testing on other machines, OS versions, and DAW's (only so much I could test myself)

I'll move the instsallers to github once I know the synth and installers are stable in all three target OSs and the various hosts.

[aaron_anderson]

What a pity there's no Intel Mac version available. Compiling this isn't the easiest task.I like the concept, though.

Intel build is now live! Link is in the youtube description.

[aaron_anderson]

I would love to support the microtuning crowd! I know about microtonality from a music theory perspective, but I have no idea where to start from a technical perspective. Do you or anyone else have some links I can dive in to on this? What features are needed?

If you're on discord feel free to join the Surge Synth Team server. We've got a tuning channel there and are always happy to help out, like Wasteland said above.

But long story short, there's two standards we feel are worth supporting. Both are useful for different things, but if you wanna start with one I'd recommend MTS-ESP. All the docs you need are here:
https://github.com/ODDSound/MTS-ESP/blo ... TSClient.h
If you get to implementation step 4 in that comment, you're hanging with the best of'em basically.

Feel free to ask here or in the Surge server if you have any questions. We've done this a number of times now and can help with examples etc. Or just testing things.

This is really helpful, thank you!

I'm unable to find the Surge Synth Team server; I think it may be private. Are you able to send me an invite? I'm "aaron_anderson." on Discord (I don't know much about discord; let me know if I need to provide more information than that).

It seems straight-forward enough to implement! I have a few items on the roadmap before it, but plan to tackle this for version 1.1.0.

[muki]

I'm unable to find the Surge Synth Team server;

if you got to the surge homepage

https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/

and do a search for "discord" (on mac cmd-f), you'll land at
"Join Surge Synth Team Discord Server"
with the link to
https://discord.gg/spGANHw

hth

[muki]

..

[Ah_Dziz]

Looks interesting but - the eternal question - will it support microtuning at some point?

I would love to support the microtuning crowd! I know about microtonality from a music theory perspective, but I have no idea where to start from a technical perspective. Do you or anyone else have some links I can dive in to on this? What features are needed?

Someone else probably already mentioned this but oddsound claims to make it very easy for developers to implement support of their tuning system. I'm not a developer so I have no idea if those claims are true.

Very neat synth!

[Dalle]

Looks interesting but - the eternal question - will it support microtuning at some point?

I would love to support the microtuning crowd! I know about microtonality from a music theory perspective, but I have no idea where to start from a technical perspective. Do you or anyone else have some links I can dive in to on this? What features are needed?

With MPE polyphonic pitchbend microtuning will work natively in Ableton Live

[aaron_anderson]

I'm unable to find the Surge Synth Team server;

if you got to the surge homepage

https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/

and do a search for "discord" (on mac cmd-f), you'll land at
"Join Surge Synth Team Discord Server"
with the link to
https://discord.gg/spGANHw

hth

Thank you!

[Old Norse]

Can confirm that Terrain (AU and VST3) now installs and works on Mac Mini Intel (2018). Sounds wild!

Can also confirm that increasing the oversampling to 16x and playing polyphonically with both my clumsy hands will incur a pretty noticable CPU hit, as noted in the video.

Thanks again for this!

[HiEnergy]

Intel build is now live!

Awesome! You rock!

Tested the AU on Ableton Live 12.0 and the VST3 on Bitwig 5.2, both under MacOS 13.6.6 on an Intel iMac 2019 (i5, 64GB RAM). Both tests worked like a charm. No CPU issues, no crashes.

Thank you very much.

[aaron_anderson]

Intel build is now live!

Awesome! You rock!

Tested the AU on Ableton Live 12.0 and the VST3 on Bitwig 5.2, both under MacOS 13.6.6 on an Intel iMac 2019 (i5, 64GB RAM). Both tests worked like a charm. No CPU issues, no crashes.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for testing! I don't have Ableton or Bitwig so I'm very pleased to hear it is working on both!

[aaron_anderson]

Can confirm that Terrain (AU and VST3) now installs and works on Mac Mini Intel (2018). Sounds wild!

Can also confirm that increasing the oversampling to 16x and playing polyphonically with both my clumsy hands will incur a pretty noticable CPU hit, as noted in the video.

Thanks again for this!

You're very welcome! Fortunately 16x is pretty overkill. I tried the worst-case scenario (the butterfly trajectory on a fully saturated terrain, with the highest note on the keyboard) and 8x oversampling was enough to remove any audible aliasing. For nearly all use cases I would recommend 2x.

Thank you for testing!

[El°HYM]

You're very welcome! Fortunately 16x is pretty overkill. I tried the worst-case scenario (the butterfly trajectory on a fully saturated terrain, with the highest note on the keyboard) and 8x oversampling was enough to remove any audible aliasing. For nearly all use cases I would recommend 2x.

Thank you for testing!

88 or 61 Keys, because a lot of digital ones start get really ugly above C5.