SynthMaker

First observations on using synthmaker

Archive · 2011 5 old posts

From the original SynthMaker forum (2004–2014), with its members’ names and dates.

davebristow ·

I just downloaded free trial of SynthMaker as I am looking for a good teaching tool for music technology/synthesis courses.

After 30 seconds of trying the program and first example synth, which looks promising - nice clean GUI and general layout, I had to give up because of the latency, and then became quickly frustrated because I could not address the issue. No audio set-up menu, nothing on the web, nothing in help files, not even a reassuring "you're in developer mode, buy the pro version and you're out of the slow lane..." Nothing, I'm just left playing a limp keyboard...

I'm the musician type sound designer, I love synths and have always been impressed by the engineers and developers who can actually make this stuff work. But playing the sounds while developing them, the feel, and consequently low latency is (perhaps unreasonably) very important to me.

Surely I've missed somthing? Does the latency disappear when the Synthmaker first example is used as a VST plug-in? (Can't test that with the trial version though)/ SynthEdit, PureData and other processor heavy apps seem to zip along well enough on my system (WIN7 64b i5).

Synthmaker looks potentially attractive - the price is getting up towards Reaktor and MAX (at academic pricing). Can someone convince me to continue looking into Synthmaker?

infuzion ·

Welcome to SM Dave! I thought latency was a driver thing...?

MichaelBenjamin ·

the free version only got direct sound which got that (quite unusable) latency. the registered versions got asio in/out, which gives the same responsiveness like other audio programs that use it.

rl ·

Hi Dave,

this is driver dependent. Personally I'm mostly using Direct Sound (I have some issues when using ASIO with SM). But for me there is no latency that bothers me.

After compiling to VST the VST-host is responsible for the audio output. If the host is ASIO compliant, everything is smooth.

Keep in mind, SM is more of a toolkit for own experimentation, which need a bit of math/engineering background. When coming from a more musician background maybe max or reactor is more suitable to you (and both have a much more extensive library).

davebristow ·

Thank you all for the comments - I'm feeling more confident already.

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