[Pd] Other synthesis methods

[derek holzer]

Hi Malte,

Malte Steiner wrote:

> It can be doubted that a Reactor oscillator is just a waveform generator without additional tricks.

There's something to be said for a full compliment of anti-aliased 
waveforms complete with pulse-width-modulation, which is something that 
PD sorely lacks beyond [ocs~] and [phasor~]. On top of that, the sound 
of a digital oscillator improves with the size of the wavetable used (or 
inversely to the amount of interpolation necessary). In some "blind" 
listening tests that Kim Cascone wrote me about, made when he worked for 
a big-time West Coast US sound hardware manufacturer, most listeners 
thought that Reaktor oscillators sounded better than those of any of the 
other software synths they checked out.

The advantage Reaktor has would probably be the size of the wavetable, 
the disadvantage being that these oscillators (as do most things 
Reaktor) use up a ridiculous amount of resources. I don't know what 
other tricks Native Instruments has thrown in there, of course, which 
could account for a lot of the overhead. But I'd be happy to hear some 
suggestions if they were things which could be implemented on the patch 
level in PD.

It could be that Csound made it into Cascone&co's (of course subjective) 
roundup, but I'd bet that the BLOP plugins from the LADSPA library would 
give Reaktor a run for its money, and surely at a cheaper cost in CPU to 
boot.

best,
d.

-- 
derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl
---Oblique Strategy # 148:
"State the problem in words as clearly as possible"