09.15.09

Little bitty soft synth

Posted in General at 12:58 pm by Steven

I remember this wavetable synthesizer with a tiny sample set (I believe it was 128kB for a GM set). Crystal developed the algorithms and sample set for a tiny (at the time, at least) one-chip MIDI synth, and I worked on implementing a software synth that used the same sample set. It was a bit of a stretch on a 90Mhz Pentium, since the whole scheme was optimized for sample size and originally implemented on a chip with bunches of hardwired MAC units. But, it worked. I listened to Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu an awful lot during the development of that one, since it stressed the system pretty well (lots of polyphony, lots of note-on/note-offs, and using the piano, which had the most parallel SRCs in flight for each note.

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