Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

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d.healey
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by d.healey »

If you don't mind a little programming then maybe try cabbage - http://cabbageaudio.com/
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

raboof wrote:
Linuxmusician01 wrote:This means that you do not know if the patches that you made, that have cost you blood sweat and tears, will still work in a year or two time. At the time people loved Pd-extended, just like you love Purrdata. Well, the patches that they made in Pd-extended do not work anymore.
Did you create any serious patches in Pd-extended yourself? While I agree it is disappointing that patches created for pd-extended are now no longer usable, I wonder how hard it would be for a pd patch author to 'port' it to other variants. This of course doesn't help you as a 'user' much, but let's be careful about extending that claim to patch authors.
Linuxmusician01 wrote:But if you, like me, want to enjoy the fruits of your work then PureData and its flavors are a no go unfortunately.
This seems kind of dramatic to me: I bet patches for the 'basic' Pure Data from the 1990s can still be imported, today, in 2019, 23 years later, into Pd-Vanilla. That's not too bad as such 'dynamic' works go.
You're right. However, Pd Vanilla was nowhere near as popular as Pd-extended. Back in the day they didn't bother to make a patch and all the extensions it needs in one, because all the extensions were already in Pd-extendend. It's like TeX and LaTeX. Imagine that all af a sudden the Leslie Lamport "extra's" for TeX aren't supported anymore. Then it is not trivial or straightforward to re-write all your LaTeX documents to work with vanilla TeX. Porting/re-writing your work after years is a nightmare. Example: I've written a fairly large shell script to rip DVD's that uses xdialog. Xdialog does not exist anymore (worked only w/ Gnome 2). For years I've wanted to re-write the script, but couldn't find the courage. I don't backup my DVD's anymore and I don't know how the whole thing works anymore w/ mencoder, variable frame rate, telecine, 3-2 pull down, etc. etc. I learned the hard way to never write something in a language that might stop working from one day to another.

I did find however a place with Pd Vanilla patches: https://patchstorage.com/platform/pd-vanilla. But the patches there are more to help you make some yourself. The old patches from http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/patches were more slick and ready to use.
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

d.healey wrote:If you don't mind a little programming then maybe try cabbage - http://cabbageaudio.com/
Looks nice. It appears to be a frontend for Csound. Csound appears to me to be a stable well supported language (ever since the 90's). It has a version of the Moog ladder filter (4 pole, 24 dB/octave) that I'm looking for. Hmmmmm, text coding. Might have to make the next step after making little simple shell scripts... I'm gonna think about it. It's tempting but intimidating at the same time....
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by raboof »

Linuxmusician01 wrote:Pd Vanilla was nowhere near as popular as Pd-extended. Back in the day they didn't bother to make a patch and all the extensions it needs in one, because all the extensions were already in Pd-extendend.
This is of course true. I guess it is interesting to answer the question why pd-extended got abandoned. Was it because there was no interest anymore since people just left? I almost can't imagine it. Perhaps pd-vanilla has changed its policy around including extensions, or made it much easier to discover and load extensions, so the need for pd-extended became less and people moved to vanilla? I haven't used Pure Data in almost 10 years, so I haven't followed it, but it would be interesting to know - that might also help understand how to best go forward.
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

raboof wrote:
Linuxmusician01 wrote:Pd Vanilla was nowhere near as popular as Pd-extended. Back in the day they didn't bother to make a patch and all the extensions it needs in one, because all the extensions were already in Pd-extendend.
This is of course true. I guess it is interesting to answer the question why pd-extended got abandoned. Was it because there was no interest anymore since people just left? I almost can't imagine it.
I don't know either but Pd is a small project by one man I think and Pd-extended might have been developed and maintained by one person too. He might have lost interest,busy w/ a day job, got a family, what have you not.
raboof wrote: Perhaps pd-vanilla has changed its policy around including extensions, or made it much easier to discover and load extensions, so the need for pd-extended became less and people moved to vanilla?
Nope. Pd-extendend was a fork. But, yes, now-a-days one can import extensions via the menu this way: "Help --> Find externals" and then type in the name of the developer of externals you like. However, that did not get me that Moog patch to work. Neither did copying all the old externals from Pd-extended's source code to my new Pd Vanilla. Pd 0.49 has changed too much since ver. 0.43 (on which Pd-extended was based).
raboof wrote: I haven't used Pure Data in almost 10 years, so I haven't followed it, but it would be interesting to know - that might also help understand how to best go forward.
If you have a patch that you made in Pd-extended try to run it in Pd Vanilla. Pd's console should give you errors in red indicating what externals you need for the patch. Try to install those via "Find Externals" and pray it works. :)
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by raboof »

Linuxmusician01 wrote:
raboof wrote:I guess it is interesting to answer the question why pd-extended got abandoned. Was it because there was no interest anymore since people just left? I almost can't imagine it.
I don't know either but Pd is a small project by one man I think and Pd-extended might have been developed and maintained by one person too. He might have lost interest,busy w/ a day job, got a family, what have you not.
Sure, people can stop maintaining projects, life happens. Then there's 2 options: either someone takes over maintainership, or no-one does. If there is sufficient interest in a project, you'd expect someone to step up. In this case, that time might be wiser spent improving Pd-Vanilla rather than maintaining 2 projects - especially when they're open to filling some of the gaps that sparked pd-extended originally.
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

raboof wrote:
Linuxmusician01 wrote:
raboof wrote:I guess it is interesting to answer the question why pd-extended got abandoned. Was it because there was no interest anymore since people just left? I almost can't imagine it.
I don't know either but Pd is a small project by one man I think and Pd-extended might have been developed and maintained by one person too. He might have lost interest,busy w/ a day job, got a family, what have you not.
Sure, people can stop maintaining projects, life happens. Then there's 2 options: either someone takes over maintainership, or no-one does. If there is sufficient interest in a project, you'd expect someone to step up. In this case, that time might be wiser spent improving Pd-Vanilla rather than maintaining 2 projects - especially when they're open to filling some of the gaps that sparked pd-extended originally.
I hear you. Pd-extendend was forked after its death to Pd-L2Ork. That died too and it was forked to Purrdata. Pd's world is one of forks, not one a monolith (anybody remember Apache Office, the fork of Open Office after that died? Anybody remember Compiz for Gnome 2?). That's a pity. However, if neither of the forks existed I'm still not completely convinced that the old patches would have worked w/ Pd Vanilla 0.49. Some of the errors I received are from "internal" functions. Maybe the new Tk version and some other new libs, that all Pd flavors use, aren't compatible w/ some old extra's or code. Only the dear Lord in Heaven knows if Pd-extended would still have worked w/ old patches if it would have been continued...
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by AlbertoZ »

I don't want this thread to deviate from the topic but there are few clarifications:
Linuxmusician01 wrote: Well, the patches that they made in Pd-extended do not work anymore.
Could you be more specific? I did all my patches in pd-extended back in the old days of 2006-2012. They work out of the box in purr-data (my little contribution to the pd world is this one: https://sites.google.com/site/albertozin/Home/pd - sorry self-advertisement :wink: , but there are much more talented people around,.). It depends if you used "externals" (I suppose you know what I mean) which in the meantime changed interface or binary format, but that is the case if you use pd-vanilla+externals as well. If your patches you built in 2005 with pd-extended did not use fancy externals but only standard abstractions your patch WILL work now, in vanilla and purr-data. One thing that is not handled very well is the knob external. For this I use mknob (from moonlib). But hey, the work done by Jonathan Wilkes (and Ico Buckvic before him) is so deep (de-linking the TCL-TL user interface from the audio engine) that it has al my respect...
Linuxmusician01 wrote: I just want to warn you and other people before they spend too much time on Pd. Peace and have lots of fun and success w/ Pd. I really mean that. :)
Do not warn me, :D all the time spent in pd for me is very rewarding. But we are all different and with different objectives, right?

Going back to the subject: no, pd is not what you search. Neither Max is. Neither Reaktor is. Not sure about cabbage (based on csound), but Synthedit is something unique as graphical patching system for creating VSTs, don't you agree?

Alberto
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by LinMusGuy »

I found a similar topic here: https://64studio-users.64studio.narkive ... -with-wine

Further I looked at some videos about Pure Data on YouTube, and it obviously is a very powerful program. But the problems mentioned here still bother me somewhat. So if anybody knows a good (and simple!) SynthEdit alternative for Linux, let me know. Maybe even for the creation of LADSPA or LV2 plugins. It doesn't absolutely need to result in a VST-plugin.
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

AlbertoZ wrote:
Linuxmusician01 wrote: Well, the patches that they made in Pd-extended do not work anymore.
Could you be more specific?
I'd love to use this patch called Miniwoog which is an emulation of the almighty Minimoog. The on-screen keyboard doesn't work and neither does loading a preset.
AlbertoZ wrote: I did all my patches in pd-extended back in the old days of 2006-2012. They work out of the box in purr-data (my little contribution to the pd world is this one: https://sites.google.com/site/albertozin/Home/pd - sorry self-advertisement :wink: [...]
Thank you for the link you your webpage w/ Pd / Purrdata patches that still work! :D I guess it's hit and miss w/ the old patches then.
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by Linuxmusician01 »

LinMusGuy wrote:I found a similar topic here: https://64studio-users.64studio.narkive ... -with-wine

Further I looked at some videos about Pure Data on YouTube, and it obviously is a very powerful program. But the problems mentioned here still bother me somewhat. So if anybody knows a good (and simple!) SynthEdit alternative for Linux, let me know. Maybe even for the creation of LADSPA or LV2 plugins. It doesn't absolutely need to result in a VST-plugin.
I just remembered something. I own a piece of hardware called a Patchblock (link official website). It's a piece of hardware w/ two rotary controllers and two knobs that can light up. One has to make one's own "patch" (or: synthesizer) w/ proprietary software that you can still dowload from the old Patchblocks.com website. That software is just like PureData and SynthEdid to my eyes (i.e. object orientated). You can connect as many Patchblocks together as you want. You could also buy a MIDI Block to connect a Midi keyboard to your Patchblocks.

Caveats: it may not be what you seek (i.e. no creation of VST's) and Patchblocks are discontinued. You can still buy old stock at some of the well known on-line stores (Thomann, Musicstore.de, etc.) and the software and all the patches made by the community can still be downloaded. Shameless self promotion: I made simple patches for of a monophonic and polyphonic synth for it (link1 link2).
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by LinMusGuy »

Where can I find some simple patches that still work on Pd 0.45.4 to use as examples of what can be done?
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by sysrqer »

LinMusGuy wrote:Where can I find some simple patches that still work on Pd 0.45.4 to use as examples of what can be done?
Have you looked at https://patchstorage.com/platform/pd-vanilla ? It has a section for vanilla, extended, and purr-data.
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Re: Freeware alternative for SynthEdit?

Post by LinMusGuy »

sysrqer wrote:
LinMusGuy wrote:Where can I find some simple patches that still work on Pd 0.45.4 to use as examples of what can be done?
Have you looked at https://patchstorage.com/platform/pd-vanilla ? It has a section for vanilla, extended, and purr-data.
Nice! Found some working ones there! :D
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