Can anyone help me decide between Dune 3 and Serum for creating Wavetables etc? (yes I have the demos of both)

[Gone soft]

So, as per the Subject I've allready tried out the demos and yet can't decide between those two for creating wavetables for use in other synths (and perhaps modular environments, just saying in hope to avoid unescessary semantic discussions but probably there'll be some anyway). I also wish to consider which will be the most usefull synth to me in itself.

Both have ways of getting interesting results fairly quick when creating my own wavetables.

As synths they're so different I can't decide which one will work best for me. Dune 3 has more modulation madness and double filters plus the polyphonic FX, Serum may give results faster but I long for so much more in the modulation department. But then with the way the modulation matrix of D3 works it can be a bit of a hassle to set up, i really wish I could just rightclick and then drag somewhere to adjust amount as in Serum.

I mostly make textures and noises from scratch (sometimes semi-harmonic) so presets are of little importance.

They both sound great to me and have some filters with interesting character, though D3 perhaps should get bonuspoints here for having two filters where some are also more flexible (multifilters etc).

I have few other Wt synths, I love my Vember Audio Surge but feel I want to upgrade to something with more characterful filters. Modulationwise and in other respects Serum will actually be a step down, but Serum sounds great and I can get interesting results lightning fast. Serum seesm to have more options when importing soundfiles to turn them into wavetables. D3 seems relatively fast to work with now, but I may tire of that darn cumbersome oldschool modmatrix. And somehow Serum just has this character I find I can't get with D3, this nice brightness without crazy nasty aliasing and to much unwanted artifacts. But then again there easily arises some strange artifacts in the wavetables in Serum which I haven't found the time to fix within the 20 minutes I can run the demo before it silences.

I wish I could just get both and be done with it, but I wish to legally purchase them and it's quite a bit of money when I'm not doing this professionally. And with all the bundles I've acummulated over the years I've got so many plugins allready which makes it hard to justify spending more now...

Sorry if I was a bit unorganized here. Hope someone can help me decide here.

[sinemotor]

Creating wavetables from scratch is usually very tedious as most of the time you'll have random waveforms. Serum has a good editor for that. You can find a lot of .wav wavetables on the net that you can import into the synth.

Serum has 2 filter sections (one is in the FX page) and much more filter types like Peaks, Comb, Flangers, Phasers... You say "modulation madness" for Dune but you just have 32 modulation slots available per patch so think about Serum : you can assign anything to its 3 Env, 8 LFOs (which can also be envelopes), 2 "Chaos LFOs"... it's unlimited you just drag&drop so I don't know why you say that it's a step down.

Dune 3 is great if you want to build a massive patch involving a lot of oscillators since it has 8 different "parts" inside one instance of the synth. It has FM oscillators, quality filters. Its reverbs, choruses, phasers sound better to my ears than the one in Serum. Not really an issue if you use external FXs but it can be a important part of a patch.

Overall, I'd say that Serum is the king of Wavetables and has one of the best user interface which allows you to get results really fast and you see what's going on which is helpful.

[Vertion]

Serum can import PNG, D3 can export Wav and WT.

I personally use Filter Forge to create my wavetables. Up to 2^32-1 partials. Built the script in lua to export to 32 bit wav files, as many samples as wanted. It uses images and textures for the phases and amplitudes, with chechbox options for saw (1/sqrt (x)) and squarification (zero out odd bin amplitudes). Never made such wild saw and square phases, with such complex patterns. I love to run a nice BP over these waveforms, so clear and vivid.

[acYm]

But then again there easily arises some strange artifacts in the wavetables in Serum which I haven't found the time to fix within the 20 minutes I can run the demo before it silences.

that's because of how it's made, there's no interpolation in between the frames in a wavetable, it's a hard cut. keep it mind it was designed "to offer something to the brostep kids"... people who think throwing a synth down the stairs and putting a rhythmic LFO is music.

[Gone soft]

Creating wavetables from scratch is usually very tedious as most of the time you'll have random waveforms. Serum has a good editor for that. You can find a lot of .wav wavetables on the net that you can import into the synth.

Serum has 2 filter sections (one is in the FX page) and much more filter types like Peaks, Comb, Flangers, Phasers... You say "modulation madness" for Dune but you just have 32 modulation slots available per patch so think about Serum : you can assign anything to its 3 Env, 8 LFOs (which can also be envelopes), 2 "Chaos LFOs"... it's unlimited you just drag&drop so I don't know why you say that it's a step down.

Dune 3 is great if you want to build a massive patch involving a lot of oscillators since it has 8 different "parts" inside one instance of the synth. It has FM oscillators, quality filters. Its reverbs, choruses, phasers sound better to my ears than the one in Serum. Not really an issue if you use external FXs but it can be a important part of a patch.

Overall, I'd say that Serum is the king of Wavetables and has one of the best user interface which allows you to get results really fast and you see what's going on which is helpful.

Yup, the Wt editing and sorting on Serum is great.

Concerning downgrading: Surge has 6 polyphonic and 6 monophonic LFOs that can also be envelopes, or they can have a complete delay attack hold decay sustain release envelope applied to the LFOs amp, or they can be stepsequencers or S&H or smooth Sample&Glideand still each of those 12LFOs have an individual envelope applied.
The extra filter in Serum is a monophonic FX and not comparable to Surge with 2 full filters with keyfollow and polyphonic modulation by assorted sources all applied per note. Also there's generally a lot of flexibility in the structure of Surge I will miss.

And yup, upon first few listens I also figured D3 seems to have better sounding FX. I guess it shouldn't matter, but they sound so good it just does.

I guess D3 is a better "upgrade" for Surge that has some FM/PM tricks etc. But then there's some things with the Wt editing and sorting in Serum, and it just has this quality to it with certain settings that I can't really replicate with anything else... Leaning towards D3 as a synth now though. That darn modmatrix in D3 though, that's something that could really need quite a few improvements.. Sigh, no easy choice this...

[Gone soft]

Serum can import PNG, D3 can export Wav and WT.

I personally use Filter Forge to create my wavetables. Up to 2^32-1 partials. Built the script in lua to export to 32 bit wav files, as many samples as wanted. It uses images and textures for the phases and amplitudes, with chechbox options for saw (1/sqrt (x)) and squarification (zero out odd bin amplitudes). Never made such wild saw and square phases, with such complex patterns. I love to run a nice BP over these waveforms, so clear and vivid.

Oh darn it, I may have to purchase D3 and rent Serum...

Filter Forge? I only know of the image editor Filter Forge, not 100% sure how you're setting up export to 32-bit wav or how you know excactly how many partials you're working with in an image editor. Or I may have misunderstood something, I have little experience with scripting (it kind of scares me almost just to think about it ).

[Gone soft]

[there's no interpolation in between the frames in a wavetable, it's a hard cut. keep it mind it was designed "to offer something to the brostep kids"... people who think throwing a synth down the stairs and putting a rhythmic LFO is music.

That's rude but hillarious! So probably turn to D3 for smoothness then, except when I want the sound of a synth crashing down the stairs with some applied rhythmic modulation...

[chk071]

Poor Steve. He surely didn't develop Serum to "offer something for the brostep kids".

[acYm]

he literally did, and is open about it...

hey you, wanna trade your largo for my serum?

idiotic 2015 acYm, can't look past the hi-tech interface and gets mired in the serum hype

[chk071]

I'd take your Serum, but, you only could take Largo from my dead hands.

[pdxindy]

Does Dune 3 do resynthesis? I have not seen any mention of it...

[pdxindy]

So, as per the Subject I've allready tried out the demos and yet can't decide between those two for creating wavetables for use in other synths (and perhaps modular environments, just saying in hope to avoid unescessary semantic discussions but probably there'll be some anyway). I also wish to consider which will be the most usefull synth to me in itself.

For creating wavetables... I'd also look at Icarus. IMO, it has better resynthesis options than Serum. At least, I find them better. As mentioned, Serum does not do any interpolation between frames, so you have to reduce the frames and then do a morph between a small number of frames to get a smooth result.

I've heard very little mention of creating wavetables in Dune 3. Also have not tried the demo yet because you get 30 days and after that you cannot demo it again. At the moment, I'm busy with other stuff so don't feel like wasting my 30 days.

[Gone soft]

Does Dune 3 do resynthesis? I have not seen any mention of it...

Some simple options for wav import at least, not as sophisticated as Serum though.

Screenshot_2018-12-11 LegendManualTOC - DUNE-3-Manual pdf.png

[cytospur]

Does Dune 3 do resynthesis? I have not seen any mention of it...

No, it doesn't.

[Vertion]

Oh darn it, I may have to purchase D3 and rent Serum...

Filter Forge? I only know of the image editor Filter Forge, not 100% sure how you're setting up export to 32-bit wav or how you know excactly how many partials you're working with in an image editor. Or I may have misunderstood something, I have little experience with scripting (it kind of scares me almost just to think about it ).

I have the filter ready to go (4.0), I can demo here. I am debating about what to do with the filter. It's the only script in FForge that exports WAV (I wrote it). I could sell it, or use it to make high quality unique wavetables and sell them for any wavetable synth. Soundsets. I'll make a sound demo tonight and place it here via Soundcloud and I'll try to include an actual wavetable here.. which anyone can open in D3, Serum, Icarus, etc. Also, screenshots of rhe filter n FF. You can also go the png route to import until serum.. the ideal image size being 2048x256 due to how Serum imports png images.