Real-time audio synth!
- Posted by Ryan W. Johnson <ryanj at fluidae?co?> Oct 07, 2007
- 520 views
I'm so excited, I just had to tell everyone! I started working on an audio synthesizer that you can control in real-time with a MIDI keyboard! It uses midi.ew (by Brent Hugh) and BassASIO (beta version) which I just recently discovered. I made a wrapper for it, which seems to be working so far. What's cool about ASIO is it has very low latency input and output. However, you can only use it if your sound card supports ASIO (most high-quality or professional ones do.) I used the sine wave generating code from the "BASS Simple Synth" demo program (that came with the Bass euphoria wrapper from Elliott Sales de Andrade) as a test. The original program (using Bass) skips unless I set it to about 50ms latency. But when using BassASIO instead, I believe my test program has only about 5-10ms latency! You can actually hear the notes instantly when you play the keys. Later, I may try making a real-time effects engine that can process incoming audio - it would be cool to make a software guitar effects processor. I'm assuming the latency would at least double when dealing with input and output. Just generating simple sine waves, it used about 60% of my CPU (Athlon64 3200+) just to play 10 notes at a time. I don't know at this point how well it will handle complex synthesis and effects. Are there any musicians here that would be interested in this project? ~Ryan W. Johnson Fluid Application Environment http://www.fluidae.com/ [cool quote here, if i ever think of one...] No, FluidAE is not dead yet I will work on it some day...