The software
The frequency domain synthesiser is not currently a
commercial product. If it is ever formally released,
it will be released as freeware. While the software
works, it is even more difficult to use than I had
anticipated. Perhaps it is most useful as a
pedagogical tool, allowing you to explore how the various
components of a natural instrument's sound are produced;
however, the original goal of producing convincing
emulations of real instruments requires months if not years
of inspiration and perspiration to get right.
The current status of the software is "alpha test", at
least until there is a reasonable library of voices for
it. It is essentially research software which just
happens to conform to a standard plug-in format so
that you can use it in the same way you would any
commercial software synthesiser. Of course the
software is as robust as I can make it, but being a
research system, it behaves somewhat differently to its
commercial brethren - the synthesiser doesn't protect you
from yourself and will cheerfully let you create voices
that are too complex to be played in real time.
The synthesiser is distributed as a Mac OS "audio unit"
plug-in, and you can use it with any host application which
supports such plug-ins. Currently, the synthesiser
only runs on version of Mac OS X from 10.5 onwards. I
don't rule out porting it to other platforms, but so much
of the code depends in either the Mac OS X Core Audio
framework and the Mac user interface that this is unlikely
for now.
You may contact me at ian@eeyore.myzen.co.uk.