Ok, so it’s been a hot minute since I said anything much about Syntə on here. Almost a year since the last update in fact - time flies when you’re having fun - and I’ve been having fun indeed 🥳

So where are we?

Well there hasn’t been a whole lot of visible progress, but a quite a lot of tweaking and fixing under the hood. The output section has undergone a series of iterations and revisions. I think I’ve finally settled on something that works well for live performance - not overly restrictive but a safe operating zone for loud soundsystems.
I built up a hefty backlog of changes of over a few months which I really wanted to get committed, my intention was to use lazygit to break it up into atomic commits, however in the end I gave up after a bit of code wrangling and shoved most of it into a weighty franken-push. Not ideal, but at least it is backed up on MS (sad face) servers now.
Each listing now has its own frequency dependent limiter, which isn’t really that expensive in terms of compute and well worth it to handle things like excessive feedback and generally prevent things from ducking the rest of the mix out.
I also removed a few things that seemed a good idea at the time but were more of a hindrance, for example the mixfactor which was counterproductive in hindsight. Generally individual listings can be assumed to occupy different frequency ranges which means a straightforward sum is the best approach rather than trying to get snazzy with averaging levels between them. All it resulted in was reducing bass - and as bottom-end is a core goal of Syntə 😃 that was a very unwelcome effect. Not trying to be too clever is probably one of my biggest lessons of my time coding.
Another leap forward has been offering more delay-line possibilities per-listing. There are now four numbered buff operators which can be used to make lush choruses, and all-pass filters for reverb. ‘Production’ nicenesss all round. I feel like I can now make ‘real’ music - or I should say - I now feel like I can create the atmospheres that I wanted. Which is great. You can hear some of my efforts on my bandcamp page.

I have fallen behind a bit with documentation. The README could do with an overhaul (it’s on the lengthy to-do list!) - especially as right now it’s hard to remember what exactly has changed. Oops.

ok, so what’s next?

Well, I’m not exactly sure really. My thinking has been revolving on this. At one point last year I contemplated shelving my porting efforts. However, I recently made a mock-up of how portaudio would work within the sound engine and magically it does indeed do what you’d expect without too much hassle! So I’m going to try rolling that in soon. It would be nice to have a portable program that can be used by sensible normal people at workshops without having to install Linux first… (I wouldn’t even dream of attempting a FreeBSD install en-masse ha 🤭) Plus, although Strudel is a great highly accessible and collaborative environment that is really fun, I find on my devices it glitches out quickly which gets frustrating. Plus I haven’t taken the time to learn it properly, which would help…
That said, another thing I should do is some more profiling of the Syntə sound engine, I managed to max it out last night with only 12 listings which it usually copes fine with. I do find it downgrades pretty gracefully though, it can even be a nice grainy effect for ‘degradation tape’ style effects.
This could also be because I upgraded my OS version recently and some settings changed.

Anyway, what else? Well I still have quite a bit of code cleanup to do, including clearing out unused features like .solo, integrating m+ with solo, overhauling the functions parsing.

The future of Syntə

Last year I had settled to a good point where it was acting as a great driver for my own personal inspiration and creation. In fact I couldn’t be more pleased with how it has helped my get my groove back and fall in love with making music and developing as an artist again. I’m really looking forward to what I can do with it over the coming months and years.
What about you lot? Well, at the last meetup there was a tentative suggestion of doing a workshop (part of a series on various topics). I do love doing workshops, however it’s a lot of time and prep to do. I’m wondering if the Pattern Club model of occasional paid workshops would be good? Like would people be up for paying £10-15 for an introductory workshop? Let me know.

Ok, I think that’s all for now. Really excited for the scene this year!

Over and out :)