Women in Technology

Article:		Make Your Own Software Synth, Part 3
Subject:		HOW TO MARKET SAMPLE BASED VST
Date:		2008-06-25 09:10:01
From:		krsna solo
hi friend i want to develop a wav sample based vsti for a particular instrument which i have already recorded samples amounting to 1 gb. so how much can synthedit be helpful? and i want to make it a commercial release. so is synthedit capable of building such a huge vsti.. what are the pros and cons? thanks krsna

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• HOW TO MARKET SAMPLE BASED VST
  2008-06-26 00:09:39  Rick Jelliffe | [View]
  
  
  What SynthEdit gives you is
  
  * GUI libraries
  * scheduling for polyphony
  * MIDI handling
  * various kinds of signal processing
  
  What it doesn't give you is the wave player AFAIK, so you will need to code that yourself.
  
  SynthEdit has three main cons:
  
  1) It's built in code does not use SIMD instructions: this is good that it runs in every system, but bad for performance. So complicated synths made just with Synthedit modules tend to be too slow for commercial release. This is why people often use it as a framework to reduce the amount of development they have to do.
  
  2) It has a lot of extra libraries made up for it, and an active developer network. However, this means you do need to do a bit of research to track things down. There is a book on SynthEdit now out with details of third-pary libraries.
  
  3) It is Windows only. (Actually, it can run on Linux too, I am told.) So you have to make alternative arrangements if you want to support the Mac as well.
  
  There is a new version of the API that is coming out soon. It looks like being a substantial improvement in many ideas.
  
  At the very least, you can use SynthEdit to prototype GUI ideas. There have been some well-rated commercial released made with SynthEdit (often used as a platform with some custom components) such as Mr Ray etc, but it has a bad marketing name because there has also been so many trivial and repetative synths made with it: some people choose to hide the SynthEdit origins for this reason (which unfortunately means that the prejudice doesn't get cleared up.)
  
  Cheers
  Rick Jelliffe