What's the hardest part in creating a synth plug-in?

[kupaasi]

I didn't find any thread about this subject but I hope this is an interesting and helpful topic for many newbies now and in the future.

I have myself studied the subject a little. I have read about minBLEPs for example. So far it looks like that the oscillator has the biggest challenges.

But have I seen only the tip of the iceberg yet? Shall I meet even bigger obstacles soon than aliasing in the oscillator? Filters should be quite straightforward? No?

How about UI? Creating the UI sounds like mostly hard work but not like rocket science, or am I wrong again?


Please share your own experiences. What have been the hardest parts in creating VST synths?

[VariKusBrainZ]

Getting the users to all agree on a nice GUI

[jupiter8]

I wouldn't say anything in particular is that hard,it's just a lot to take in at once. I would never in a million years have figured out how to do filters by myself but there's plenty of example code for those so it isn't a problem.

It's just a very complex system where everything needs to fit just right. Get one thing wrong and the whole thing explodes. Kind of.

[Caco]

The UI and the voice handling as for me they are the really boring bits

The oscillators and filters are fun so that detracts from any difficulties there may be

[camsr]

I would think the code profiling is the most boring time consuming part, but it's the most technical thing so I guess it could be fun to someone

[hibrasil]

+1 for voice handling - tedious and tricky to do well. not so much practical info about it around

[V@dim]

I didn't find any thread about this subject but I hope this is an interesting and helpful topic for many newbies now and in the future.

I have myself studied the subject a little. I have read about minBLEPs for example. So far it looks like that the oscillator has the biggest challenges.

But have I seen only the tip of the iceberg yet? Shall I meet even bigger obstacles soon than aliasing in the oscillator? Filters should be quite straightforward? No?

How about UI? Creating the UI sounds like mostly hard work but not like rocket science, or am I wrong again?


Please share your own experiences. What have been the hardest parts in creating VST synths?

You can easily create some component (filter, oscillator, etc). But creating a good one is not so easy. Indeed there is many obstacles to overcome.

[sascha]

I think the actual techniques for creating good-sounding and high-performant oscillators, filters and such are somewhat easy to learn, at least during an empirical process.

But for me, the hardest part is creating a good workflow (if 'work' applies at all here...) and come up with good UI interaction. There's masses of good-sounding plugins around, but only few of them make me want to concentrate on the music-making process, rather than playing the engineer.
This is always a big challenge for any software developer, no matter in which business: you have to be empathic enough to have an idea of how the user thinks and how he/she actually approaches the process from 'the opposite side'. Although, 'thinking' is also a bit misleading; making music often takes place beyond the scope of complete control of the mind. This is often neglected and perhaps a reason why humans tend to swing more easily to something that's more 'organic' rather than 'perfect'.

In a nutshell, I see the hardest part in
- creating a synth that is easy to operate and isn't feature-bloated,
- implementing a concept that hides too-technical things from the majority of musicians, and a concept that chooses a certain direction, rather than being everybody's darling,
- creating a friendly and inspiring look, something you feel comfortable with. I mean, people fall in love with guitars and keep them in their bedrooms, but most synths keep on pushing you into the the mad-scientist role...

[Chris Walton]

What have been the hardest parts in creating VST synths?

Finishing it.

[Full Bucket]

Finishing it.

This is no joke!

• 1. Coding is fun
  2. Making the UI is OK
  3. Creating presets can be a pain in the... well, you know where
  4. Writing the documentation...
  5. Doing the final testing
  6. Packaging
  7. Preparing the website etc.

And you can be sure that you've missed and/or messed something.

Conclusion: It's big fun!

Cheers Björn

[Urs]

The uniqueness.

[davidguda]

Have to agree with the finishing it part.
The thing is you have to be good at everything at once!
Uniqueness, oh yes. I'm in the stage now where I have just a finished synth on the market and the interest has been, moderate to say the least. Partly because I haven't really marketed it yet and probably party because virtual analog has been done quite a few times, no matter if it is good the competition is fierce!

[mystran]

I think my biggest problem with finishing stuff is that I keep playing with it, and then I realize I can tweak it a bit, and then I keep playing with it again, and so on and on.. the more features, the more time spent playing, the less developing..

[V@dim]

I haven't really marketed it yet

Have you been marketing it by youself? Marketing is a neat thing, which (I believe) shouldn't be done by the developer himself. (For example, there are ios\android publishers like chillingo, which are said to do marketing work very well). I'd recommend you a publisher... if I knew at least one myself! Seeking vst(i) publisher in google does not reveals anything... I wonder if there is a vst(i) publisher anywhere in the net?

[sascha]

I think my biggest problem with finishing stuff is that I keep playing with it, and then I realize I can tweak it a bit, and then I keep playing with it again, and so on and on.. the more features, the more time spent playing, the less developing..

But that devides the real playable stuff from the nerd tools. I can't see something bad about that