Some time ago John (a.k.a. Buckshag) started working on a modular software synthesizer system. It all started small and simple, but after some more people got involved in the project quite some progress was rapidly made.In the end the project covered two parts:

The Engine

The engine was a library called SynthLib. It had several built-in modules which had inputs and/or outputs. The user of the library could link instances of modules together and form a network this way. The engine consisted of a loop which traveled through the network, passing audio and controller data between the linked modules, after which it would pass the chunk of rendered audio data to the soundcard and repeat the same cycle again and again.

There were all kinds of built-in modules. At the beginning of the project we made a simple oscillator, a lowpass filter and a mixer. At the end of the project we had a complete sytnhesizer module (Bacteria), a sequencer/tracker module, and even a guitar module (which was almost finished).

And other important feature of the engine was that it had a small footprint of only 30kb.

The Editor

To be able to create some nice soundtracks we made a tool which served as a frontend for SynthLib: MuziekBakker.

MuziekBakker was meant to be a cheap Reason (from Proppellorheads) imposter, this way the musicians (izard and organix) could use it without having to adjust to it too much.

As you can see from the screenshots it looks horrible, but we didn’t care much about that, it’s the stuff it is capable of that counts 😉

Tech: C++, Windows audio

Listen:

Muziekbakker, a synth, some reverb and a sequencer

Muziekbakker, a basic set-up

Muziekbakker, our sequencer