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How many soft synths there are?

Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2018 6:47 am
by tavasti
Yesterday evening I was browsing different synths I seem to have, and testing them. Althou I haven't been very active on collecting everything, still there seems to be lots of them, and they have plenty of patches, so that amount of time to be spend on evaluating different sounds could be infinite.

Is there any estimate how many different soft synths exists in the world?

And if that would not be enough big number, how many different factory/downloadable patches they have?

From starting on my own disk:
- Number of vst files on my disk seem to be 89, but some of them are not instruments. Pretty low number, for example http://www.vst4free.com/ has about 700 entries on category instruments (skipping arpegiators). Checked mine with:
find -L vst* .vst* | grep -iE '\.dll$|\.so$' | wc
- Sure I have some synths from native linux packages, but I don't know how to calculate number of instruments from them
- Number of different soundfont patches on my disk is 4477. Calculated with:
find Music/sf2/ -type f | while read i; do c=$(($c+$(echo "inst 1" | fluidsynth "$i" 2>/dev/null | grep -E '^[0-9][0-9][0-9]-'| wc -l ))); done ;echo $c
But for patches of synths I have? Dexed has 32 banks of 32 pathes, making 1024 alone. ZynAddSubFX seems to have 1165 presets.

Re: How many soft synths there are?

Posted: Fri Nov 16, 2018 9:03 am
by rghvdberg
My estimate on the number of softsynths: a lot :wink:

On kvraudio.com you can find a lot of them too. And there's a cool thread :
Old Free VSTi Gems From The Past
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopi ... 1&t=177407

99.99999% is windows plugins of course