[edit: ReSynth2 has now been released]

Today, I am glad to announce the first beta of ReSynth2.

It has really been a community lead project for this iteration. It started off with a poll of user feedback of requested features and I think I managed to get nearly all of them in.

First, the bad news: Despite leading the poll, FM synthesis has not been included. This was mainly due to keep the code sane and it really made the GUI a horrendous clutter. However. stay tuned for a potential new FM synthesis tool in the future…

Now onto the good stuff:

Here it is. ReSynth2 beta:

ReSynth2 has been a complete rewrite and is internally much cleaner than the original ReSynth. This has lead to less code duplication and a much faster synthesis.

Because of the speed gains, I managed to add additional features and keep the general overall speed about the same.

Guided walkthrough of the features:

Immediately, you can see there are four oscillators. This allows you to create some BIG sounds.

Each oscillator can be either ‘analog’ or ‘wavetable’. These will be explained later.

Each oscillator has a ‘calm’ or ‘harsh’ setting. This changes the sounds interpolation settings and has the overall effect of something similar to oscillator smoothing.

The analog oscillator has four basic waveforms:

sin/tri

pulse wave

sawtooth

noise

The analog oscillator has retained the wavemod control but the behaviour is slighty different depending upon the waveform.

For sin/tri is morphs the sample from a pure sine wave to a more triangular waveshape.

For pulse waves, it sets the default pulse width (50% down to 0.8%).

For sawtooth and noise it has no affect.

The wavemod can also have an LFO applied. This has both a depth control for the amount of LFO to apply and the length of the LFO (from 2 up to 256 wavecycles). To maintain speed, it is only applied if both of these are > 1.

Next along is the settings for the wavetable oscillators. This allows the user to quickly and easily load in their own samples to replace an analog oscillator. Samples must be placed in the ‘waveforms’ folder within the tool. Each folder will appear as a ‘wavebank’ within which all ‘.wav’ samples are listed as available ‘waveforms’. Samples should be tuned to ‘C’.

Each oscillator has a transpose (-24 to +24 semitones) and fine tuning (-63 to +64 cents) control.

Each oscillator has a volume (off, or -36 to +12db) and panning (50L to 50R) control.

Patch management has been really simplified, just treat the instrument as a normal XRNI. Everyone will be able to play the instrument due to the prerendering of waveforms, while users who have the tool installed will be able to simply open the instrument and continue editing.

If the sample editor is visible in the main Renoise window, modifying the controls (via GUI or MIDI) will display the associated updated waveform to visually show what changes are occuring.

To display the values assocated with any rotary dials on the GUI, hover the mouse over the control and the tooltip will display the current value.

Most controls are MIDI mappable. The only exception is the wavetable bank and wave selection boxes as if you have many files in the sample folder, sometimes you cannot select some due to the limited resolution of MIDI controls.

As with Resynth1, all instrument envelopes, filter settings etc will need to be set from the normal Renoise window due to no API access.

To access the tool, select ‘New Resynth Instrument’ to start afresh or ‘Open as Resynth Instrument’ to attempt to open the selected instrument as a Resynth patch. These menu items appear both in the instrument list and the Tools main menu.

Enjoy!

Please give feedback. Like it? Found a bug? Made it crash? Made a great sound? Reply to this thread please.

[edit: we found a bug on IRC. on startup, each oscillator is set to -3dB. For four oscillators this results in a total instrument peak of +6dB. Thus, if your headroom is above -6dB you will experience clipping. This will be fixed in the defaults for the final release]

[edit2: beta1 removed, get release candidate 1 here]