New version of nekobee

I've just uploaded a new version of nekobee. I fixed the excessively loud output (roughly five times louder than say hexter) which caused a few problems, modified the output to have an atan waveshaper to give a bit of distortion (and provide a quick fix for the output going crazy at high resonance settings), and tweaked the filter code to more accurately reflect the "kind-of-18dB/oct" filter shape. Grab it, try it out, and let me know how you get on. Download it either from svn, or grab the tarball

Updated on 08/25/07 16:54:09

LRL 2007

Months later, another update - this time from Lugradio Live. I'm currently sitting in a talk on Fluendo, which is some pretty interesting stuff. The last time I used a streaming server was six or seven years ago, when it was pretty much Realserver, Quicktime and nothins else. I'm going to have a play with that when I get back. And of course, if you're at LRL give me a shout. I've got half an eye on IRC most of the time 'cos the venue has wifi.

Long overdue update…

Well, I'm still here, just really really busy. Only one tiny update to the plugins - Juuso Alasuutari sent in a patch to stop nekobee's configure script trying to detect gtk1.x libs. It won't build against these, so detecting their presence is silly. Thanks, Juuso. This patch is now in SVN trunk. I'm not going to release a tarball until I finish the mods to the filter to give better clipping and stability when sweeping the cutoff frequency through the pitch of the note that's playing at high resonance - at the moment the output goes massively offscale ('orrible loud noises).

I've cracked a couple of problems that were sticking me with the organ and string synth plugins, namely the phasing issues when you hit notes an octave apart. I will be writing up a page on how I propose to tackle the problem. Oh, and I might well switch the Karplus-Strong plugin to a phase accumulator delay line rather than changing the length of the delay line, thus allowing pitch bend and vibrato.

More of all this anon ;-)

Hex conversion

I'm going to express my age in hexadecimal now, so I can say I'm 0x21 today ;-)

nekosynth

Since it was first released in 2004, the Disposable Soft Synth Interface has allowed Linux audio users to have simple plugin software synthesizers. Over time, the number of these has grown as users and coders have developed new plugins for particular sounds. Now, nekosynth brings some new plugins to enrich your sonic palette.

This site is currently heavy on text and light on graphics. I hate "under construction" messages and graphics, but the site *is* pretty much under construction. Please try and stay off anything that looks wet or not bolted down properly.

The plugins

At the moment there are three plugins, only one of which is in any way ready to use. Recreate those squelchy acid sounds with nekobee, a simple single-oscillator synth based on the Roland TB-303. For warm pads, have a look at nekostring (currently under development), which imitates the polyphonic string ensembles of the 1970s. Finally there is Wsynth-DSSI, a hack on Xsynth-DSSI to allow wavetable synthesis. It's not really under active development any more, but a new re-written version will be started Real Soon Now.

Demo sounds

nekobee

Simple acid patterns, with TR-808 samples from Qsynth: nekoacid.mp3 nekoacid.ogg

nekostring

Clean, with no additional effects: stringclean.mp3 stringclean.ogg

Through a phaser and a bit of reverb: stringpad.mp3 stringpad.ogg

Deeply resonant phased bass drone: stringbass.mp3 stringbass.ogg