Article on 4K Synths

[valis]

Found this on in4k...

http://in4k.untergrund.net/index.php?title=4k_synth

[Ferris]

http://in4k.untergrund.net/index.php?title=Seminar_Content

Top link Seminar I gave on 4k synths at TG last year. Giving another this year about 4k frameworks and starting a 4k intro.

[LittleWhite]

If you need more infoon 4k:

http://code4k.blogspot.com/

[valis]

I'm primarily interested in programming games and the reason I'm interested in 4k synths is because they seem to offer a very quick and simple way of producing sound and music.  I'm looking at implementing one of my own now, none of the offerings for Blitz seem to fit the bill, really.

Can anyone recommend one with well-commented C source?

Ferris: I thought probably someone from here would be on that site.  One of those things that seems like a huge coincidence but isn't. 

[Ferris]

Well, for games, not so much, since most 4k synths precalculate the music and have very large RAM requirements. Ironically, 64k synths would be better. There's a 4-article series by KB/Farbrausch describing his synth, V2, here:

http://conspiracy.hu/articles/

A realtime synth would be better because it can respond instantly when you want to do things like play your own sounds. A simple DirectX interface would suffice, since it can do all the mixing for you and some postprocess effects (build-in reverb, delay, etc).

[hellfire]

I'm primarily interested in programming games

Keep in mind that most synths are meant to produce music and not sound effects.
Games using a synth didn't do a very convincing job in that area.
If you want to gather a rough understand of how an actual synth works you should have a look at Gordon Reid's acrticles.
After that you can simply pick all required code-snippets from musicdsp.org.

[valis]

Games using a synth didn't do a very convincing job in that area.

Ain't talkin' bout no Call of Duty up in here.

Talkin' bout clicks and beeps.  "PEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWW" and "POWWW!"

[Ferris]

Yeah, a simple synth with midi processing would be the way to go. I would greatly suggest again those articles about kb's 64k synth. Aside from targeting the synth to be small (which I assume isn't one of your biggest worries right now), he talks about how the sound is designed, midi data, things like that. After reading those, decide what kinds of sound generators you'd like (simple analog-style ones should surely suffice with proper amp/pitch envelopes and filtering) and hit up musicdsp.org as hellfire mentioned. Great signal processing algorithms there.

[EDIT] - Articles 3 and 4 are focused more on the synth design; the first is more introductory and the second is about using midi data because it's small.

[valis]

Thanks for the good help.  That DSP site is just what I wanted.

And yeah, the reason I was interested in 4k synths is because I figure that 4k is small enough for my tiny brain to comprehend.  This is probably wrong (my brain is much smaller than it used to be, at least the parts that work) but there has to be some complexity-limiting thing going on there as well.

I'm starting to think that some of the things I'm running into (crackling) may be issues with my hardware.  Or something. 

[Ferris]

crackling? Could be clipping, but a more likely issue would be buffer length. Are you using a realtime or precalc synth?