Minicomputer

Industrial Grade Digital Synthesizer for Linux

Minicomputer is a standalone Linux softwaresynthesizer for creating experimental electronic sounds as its often used in but not limited to Industrial music, IDM, EBM, Glitch, sound design and minimal electronic. It is monophonic but can produce up to 8 different sounds at the same time.
It uses Jack as realtime audio infrastructure and can be controlled via Midi.

Minicomputer is free open source software distributed under GPL 3 written by Malte Steiner 2007-2010.

update 1.41:
31.January.2010
- fix: names of patches and multis were displayed wrong, only the last letters which are usually blanks
- fix: change so that it can be now compiled without being in C99 mode
- new: using alsaseq eventfilter to receive only events that are processed

This project doesn't provide binary packages but for Ubunutu 9.10 Karmic there is one available at following Launchpad repo:
https://launchpad.net/~philip5/+archive/extra/+sourcepub/948759/+listing-archive-extra

Projects already using it are
Notstandskomitee
Akustikkoppler

Minicomputer was used for example by Notstandskomitee at LAC 2008 at the club night 29.2.2008 and shown at Frankfurter Musikmesse 2008 12.-15.3. at the booth B66 in hall 5.1 by Synthesizer Magazin
Sonic State took a videoride over the booth and Minicomputer is in it:http://www.sonicstate.com/news/shownews.cfm?newsid=6327

The application is split into 2 programms, the engine written in C and an editor written in C++.
Its brand new so it will take a while until binarys are available in the repositories of your favorite Linux distribution. So most likely you have to compile it on your own which actually means at best, if all librarys are installed on your computer, just typing in scons from within the Minicomputer directory.

Dependencies includes:

Jack
FLTK
Alsaseq
pthreads
liblo

and

Scons for building

Take care, it can be harsh! Use it on your own risk, you have been warnend!

Minicomputer doesn't ape any existing synthesizer but has a rather traditional, subtractive approach and thus is easy to operate. Its made of 8 parallel voices forming a multitemperal setup, suited for example as a drumsynth. Each voice is monophonic in itself so it can play only one key per time, additional triggers might cut off a sound of the same voice which was already on or fading.

The sound architecture:

Each voice have two oscillators feeding a morphing filter which is made of 3 filters in parallel, creating vivid formants often result in vocal like sound. Each voice includes a complete delay line which can be also modulated by envelopes, oscillators, Midi events etc. Every part is calculated sample accurate so it is not that easy on the cpu, but on the other hand features a rich sound and synthesis flexibilty. Because the filter can create three resonances, the signal path can be feedbacked on several modulation points and every modulator can reach into audio range, volume differences can occur so take care.