To SynthEdit or not to SynthEdit

[mkastrup]

The latest Guess the Synth thread which to manys surprice was OPX - PRO II gave me an excuse to look up my old Evol VST plugin which in basic is a PURE SynthEdit stock modules made softsynth. I think we owe Jeff and SynthEdit more than the credit given. I remember in KVR early days at least 50% of post made was related to SynthEdit. From that program came tons of crazy synth concepts out to the masses, yep many were pretty crazy sounding but from time to time something popped up which raised the mark for new synths development.

32bit vs 64bit has kinda put a solid lid on the stream of SynthEdit synths in use around in peoples studios, so we forget and move on. Dont want the hazzle with getting 32bit to work on 64bit machines, and thus the old SynthEdit legacy dies out. However is it really fair to those old goodies from back then ? IF someone can make them work we at least should try make them work for ourselves. The program that saved my old creation "Evol" was jBridge. Now that i got it working on my new system i thought give it a chance, is it really obsolete or what ?

After 3 hours i came up with the following, all made by Evol. I used Limiter and Stereo Enhancer on the master mix and some sampled drums. I am NOT writing Evol off just yet

Here is a Jazzy version of Evol almost 10 years after it was made:
11 Instances of Evol and some drums.

http://www.xsynth.com/demos/Evol_April_2014.mp3

Would love to hear other SynthEdit oldies

/Michael

[BBFG#]

The direct answer to the question for me is simply
"... not to SynthEdit".
Everything as of late is in preparation of 32 bit becoming more problematic as time goes by.
ATM, I have three VI companies that are 32 bit only and one does not work at all (due to a lack of driver updates I assume).
That one is EMU Proteus X2. Then there is the actual SynthEdit ones I have from HG Fortune which work most of the time but are known to have errors in loading or can crash/freeze causing the necessity to reboot the DAW. Lastly, there is the IKMs, which have been stable regardless of their lack of updating it to current standards; without a major overhaul still lost in its own fantasy of whether it will ever materialize beyond its own testing rooms.

Things I liked from SynthEdit, I now look for in Reaktor as the best promise to replace them. Anything in IKM, I look for in Kontakt.
It just appears to me that they are the ones that will eventually have the longest life span. And it's in my best interest to not invest anymore into coding that cannot cross the 64 bit Rubicon.

[murnau]

SynthEdit needs the next big step which is x64 support. even most freeware is released as x64 so it's pretty a standard nowdays nothing special. i'm personally not willing to use bridged versions doesn't matter what it is.

[fluffy_little_something]

Nice tune there, reminds me of another song, by SWV if I am not mistaken.
And the sound is very good You got talent and taste, so you can make music with any decent plugin.
I have just spent hours with Superwave's Performer and P80 synths, also SE, they can sound very good. And they use just a fraction of what modern $xxx proprietary synths use. So I can run a dozen instances plus effects at the same time on my AMD computer
My SE stuff is the reason why I don't care about 64-bit for the time being. 64-bit does not give me real advantages, but would instead make my life more complicated...
I suppose with pros and studios it is a different story, but they tend to have more powerful computers, so why would they stick with SE stuff? They get Spire, Diva or whatever, that's all you need.

[Sendy]

Synthedit's positives more than make up for the dross it's enabled. It's been a platform and "gateway drug" for a lot of talented people who might not have got going without the leg-up that Synthedit provided.

[robogone]

SynthEdit needs the next big step which is x64 support. even most freeware is released as x64 so it's pretty a standard nowdays nothing special. i'm personally not willing to use bridged versions doesn't matter what it is.

+1

I don't want to have to bridge stuff, so I've pretty much retired anything I had that was Synthedit. Can't see 64 bit coming anytime soon, so I'm not really thinking of pulling them out of retirement either, and that's assuming the developers even create 64 bit versions.

[NEK-X]

This discussion is actually pointless.
Either you use 64 bits PC´s... and renounce many good Freeware.
Or you use furthermore 32 bit Systems... and has a lot of fun

[yessongs]

that brass patch is really cool. Are those stock presets in evol?

There are lots of SE synths that I love. prodigious and poly2106, minimogue va, antitranspirant from tube ohm and others like the recent phasewave. Some guys like 2dat have made free synths without using synth edit and they seem to put out pretty decent stuff as well but they do have that rare skill and passion plus obviously lots of spare time to do such generous work that benefits us all. Imagine if Diva was a free synth the way people round here talk about it many would never ever have to buy any synths.

Mike if that tunes presets are not in the EVOL factory bank please load them to the kvr database because that tune was bad ass for using an old free synth and I will definitely revisit evol and in fact I am looking at trying a bunch of the older VSTI this weekend because there are a lot I just discovered for the first time. I think there are a lot of great sounds to mine from these older synths. They use less memory and you can always layer them on top of your other synths to create more interesting stuff.

A trick I found to help with using older synths is to rewire reaper inside of your daw and use the synth inside reaper inside your daw because I think reapers bridging is as good as jbridge in a lot of instances. Some synths like sonigen, proteus vx, voyager and PG8X will work for me that way so that I won't have to mess with getting jbridge.

[xoxos]

This discussion is actually pointless.
Either you use 64 bits PC´s... and renounce many good Freeware.
Or you use furthermore 32 bit Systems... and has a lot of fun

to me, the whole fun and joy of vst was autonomy of SE getting a foothold in the memetic food pyramid.. before synthedit, unless you were willing to spend, you were quite stuck for vst. eg. there were free percussion vst, but they had a *linear* pitch envelope.. severely limiting their range of effective application.................

so moving to 64 bit was a decisive victory for The Industry.. there's no difference in product quality resultant from 64 bit o.s. compatability, essentially the entire exodus was driven by consumers using the largest hosts, and dragging everyone else along with them, eventually.

if only they'd said f**k you, but the corps can just wait, and the new consumers will come along who don't know or care about why f**k you is an intelligent response. they f**ked me - how many guys who started buying vst two years ago can name an SE developer? i have no desire to learn a 64 bit compiler in time for them to introduce a 128 bit o.s. and f**k us again.

i still want to make that movie about SE's cultural impact.

[whyterabbyt]

This discussion is actually pointless.
Either you use 64 bits PC´s... and renounce many good Freeware.
Or you use furthermore 32 bit Systems... and has a lot of fun

Or run 32-bit plugins in a 32-bit host on a 64-bit system
Or run 32-bit-plugins in a 64-bit host via a bridge.

[mkastrup]

that brass patch is really cool. Are those stock presets in evol?

Nopes none of them are stock but modified versions from the included presets. The bad thing however is that i cant share them because i just discovered that presets are not saved correctly within Cubase VST Preset format What a bummer !

[bluedad]

This discussion is actually pointless.
Either you use 64 bits PC´s... and renounce many good Freeware.
Or you use furthermore 32 bit Systems... and has a lot of fun

Or run 32-bit plugins in a 32-bit host on a 64-bit system
Or run 32-bit-plugins in a 64-bit host via a bridge.

this
I have both 32 and 64-bit versions of Live and Cubase

[Doc Brown]

This discussion is actually pointless.
Either you use 64 bits PC´s... and renounce many good Freeware.
Or you use furthermore 32 bit Systems... and has a lot of fun

Or run 32-bit plugins in a 32-bit host on a 64-bit system
Or run 32-bit-plugins in a 64-bit host via a bridge.

Or run Reaper x64 and all the x32 bit synths you want.

Seriously though, my experience with Reapers built in bridge has been awesome. Pretty much everything runs as if it were x64 coded. I rarely see an issue with any plug I load up in Reaper.

Reaper definitely has some cons but for 60 bones and virtually rock solid for any synth edit or x32 plug is pretty cool.

[whyterabbyt]

This discussion is actually pointless.
Either you use 64 bits PC´s... and renounce many good Freeware.
Or you use furthermore 32 bit Systems... and has a lot of fun

Or run 32-bit plugins in a 32-bit host on a 64-bit system
Or run 32-bit-plugins in a 64-bit host via a bridge.

Or run Reaper x64 and all the x32 bit synths you want.

its not an 'or', its the same as my second one; Reaper uses a bridge.

[The_Hidden_Goose]

I still use it for my own personal gadgets.

The synth I use most is Phonec (it's the default instrument in my custom init. project). There's very little I've done since it came out that doesn't use it somewhere. It may well be stuffed with their own proprietary modules though (never checked).

I do lament that development is so slow with the 64bit - not for any advantages that 64bit brings (which is next to none unless you're using huge samples sets) but for the simple reason that fewer people are devloping for it - CK, DH, EVM etc... They might not have all given up because of the lack of 64bit, but I'm guessing the slow development has been a factor. I know Jeff is a one-man-band, and synthedit is probably a very complex beast to develop so I'm not pointing fingers or anything. It's just a shame there isn't the vibrant community there once was.

But still...my host of choice is still 32bit for the time being (although 64bit is in beta) so SE creations tend to run as well on my machine as they ever did - or better, now that my CPU is a monstah compared to anything I've had before, as some of the old creations weren't exactly optimised - like many of my own gadgets!

I'm still expecting one or two SE creations appearing in DC2014