Several more hours of spacesynth...

Spacesynth and Italo Disco are closely related--Spacesynth is instrumental Italo Disco with a bit more emphasis on science fiction and fantasy themes--hence the "Italo Disco" in the two album titles. Both genres feature wall-to-wall synthesizers and drum machines but Italo Disco uses normal singing while ( Read more... )

It's been a while...

Earlier this week, a member of the Battlezone community posted a video of a project they were working on and I liked the music they had going in the background. I asked what it was and they sent me a YouTube link:

Click to view

Apparently, this is a new(ish) album from a famous Dutch Spacesynth duo named Rygar whose members originally ( Read more... )

These sure sound familiar...

Amiga Days (Remasters) - Volume 1
Amiga Days (Remasters) - Volume 2
Amiga Days (Remasters) - Volume 3

Diggin' In The Carts: Episode 1

I found out earlier this week that I was doing the spectrum analyzer wrong.

I had noticed from the beginning that I got broad "cusp" shapes with long tails on either side instead of narrow vertical bars. It turns out that I was asking BASS to do a Fast Fourier Transform much larger than the audio buffer so it was padding the sample data with ( Read more... )

It's been a while since I've posted a new version of the mini-synthesizer. It has a significantly faster filter, improved sound output, revised menu system with effects on a separate page, "colored noise" oscillator (controlled by Width parameter of Noise oscillator), sample-and-hold and linearly-interpolated noise oscillators, improved spectrum ( Read more... )

I found a couple new virtual analog filters for my synthesizer.

The first is a linear version of the Antti Huovilainen nonlinear filter. It has most of the benefits of the nonlinear version such as accurate tuning and turned out to be slightly faster than the Improved Moog filter I was using. It wasn't a big difference but it was definitely ( Read more... )

Yay, a new release of the mini-synth! Now with MIDI input (and improved performance)...

How to try out MIDI input if you don't have a real MIDI keyboard:

• Install loopMIDI and create a virtual MIDI port
• Install a virtual MIDI keyboard like VPMK or virtualKeys; there's plenty of choices
• Set the virtual MIDI keyboard to output to the virtual MIDI port
• ( Read more... )

I found that the virtual analog filter takes about half the total CPU time. Half of that seems to be the soft saturation function in the filter feedback path. I'm using a rational polynomial approximation of hyperbolic tangent that's faster than tanh() but not by as much as I had hoped. A simpler cubic curve and a hard clipping function (clamp) ( Read more... )

I finally came up with a way to impose "maximum load" on the synthesizer without scrubbing the mouse cursor across a virtual MIDI keyboard for the better part of a minute. Testing code sets up the oscillators and filters and then triggers one note-down event per voice (C major chords across five octaves). With no variation caused by input, the CPU ( Read more... )