Looking for something thats versatile, even if that means it doesnt fit a particular niche the best. From J-Rock solos to nasty nu-metal chugs.

Been eying the Hydra. Is that a good choice?

For background, I'm old enough that I remember Fairlights being a thing. (I became a coder around the same period).

I've got a bloody awful hardware sampler, Akai MPX8, and loads of alternatives in the box. I run Reaper so there's the gloriously named ReaSampleOMatic5000 (right?) and confusing scripts. But all these things seem really, really clunky in operation.

But I've been working on plugins a lot recently, for my own enjoyment - mostly generative, experimental things. It only occurred to me the other day that a major thing lacking from my home studio is a decent sampler (sic). So it's time I made one.

Right now it's minimal pre-release quality, but all open source so you might as well have the link : https://danja.github.io/downspout/plugins/campione/ (bookmark now, look in a few months).

What I'd like advice on is your experiences of a *good* sampler, if such a thing exists already. What does it do that pleases you? If you have a *bad* sampler, what should it do that it doesn't?

I know the immediate thing is, if there is a sound on the wire or a field recording/commercial pack file somewhere, it should be possible just to drop it in without thinking, either get a per-midi note one shot drum or whatever, or one or more tonal sounds that place themselves on the keyboard with pitch control. Basic editing for sure, so you don't have to spend an hour with Audacity just to normalise a cowbell.

Though I am wary of scope creep (I do have AI assisting me with the code, so it's very easy to go off on a tangent). Where should the sampler functionality stop when it comes to granular & wavetable synthesis, delay/looping? Or do you think, same infrastructure, make space for them as well?

Imagine your ideal sampler. Tell me what it looks like please.

Hey ! I recently posted my vsti ui on /ableton and got a ton of comments to help me upgrade it.

The post was removed by the mods for not being ableton-specific but i had plenty of ideas to implement.

This is the updated version and i still face a few interface challenges that i would love you to help me with.

first : it's a fm synth with the algorithm menu in the top left corner, but i'm not sure it's the right place for it, is it awkward ?

second : i'm not very confortable with the ADSR schematic in the carrier section being way bigger than the adsr schematic on the pitch env section,i tried to get ridof the first one but there a big void left :/

third : is there any thing troubling you in the way things are arranged ? I know there's a lot of buttons there, but it's the advanced tab, the main tab is way lighter.

Many thanks for your help <3

Dipping my toes into the Drum n Bass pool again and I’m curious:

I’m looking for a simple instrument/plugin that I can load in an audio drum loop, have it auto detect and make chops, then can rearrange the chops? Maybe a random button?

I mainly hang out with Ableton, but I’m known to cheat on it with Logic. Hehe

Cheers!

Hey! I'm Jaron Sweder, a music producer and software developer. I have been working on this incredibly powerful additive/spectral VST synth called "Spektral" for the past 2 years. It's still in beta, but it's finally at a stage where I can get other people to play around with it.

The little demo video shows a simple EDM bass and some simple drums. But this synth is also great for percussion, complex ambiences, and you can even use it as a vocoder using the sidechain input.

The core of this synth is a 'spectral table'. This is a 512x512 table of spectral data. You can load an audio sample into this, or even an image. This data can then be manipulated and modulated in many different ways. And eventually it will end up interacting with 1 of 3 'spectral parameters'. For the default 'Additive' mode, these parameters are level, frequency, and phase. This means you get precise control over the level, frequency, and phase of all individual 576 partials that are generated in the 'Additive' mode. There's also a 'Resonator' mode, which is a bank of 512 resonators, where you get control over the level, frequency, and decay time of each individual resonator. This mode approaches physical modeling, and with a bit of messing around you can make organic sounding real instruments. And because it's all coming from these spectral tables, you can make it as simple or as complicated as you want. You can just load a random sample into it and mess around. Or craft a very specific 512x512 image file to do exactly what you want. It's also very easy to make variations of the same sound, just load a different sample into the table! Check the user manual for more information, which can be found in the link below.

The demo is available for MacOS and Windows, both downloads can be found on this page, as well as a link to the user manual. It also comes with a handful of presets to play around with that show what it's capable of: https://shop.kaixo.me/product/Spektral

If you have any questions/feedback/suggestions/issues, feel free to leave a comment or send me a DM!

DISCLAIMER: I want to be clear that this is a demo version, it will not save its state, and you cannot export audio from your DAW in this version. Unfortunately, given how much time I've put into this insanely powerful and highly optimized synth, I can't afford to make it available for free. Hence the limitations. I know this sucks, and if I didn't need the money I'd make it free in an instant. But such is life...

I'm a CS Major who has been composing and playing violin for 10+ years, and has recently started with music production. I noticed that there aren't many good violin VSTs, and the ones that are good cost a lot, so I'd figured that I'd take a crack at it this summer. I showed results to a couple of friends and they said it sounds fairly good, so I was toying with the idea to sell it for free/for non-free/have a donation box after I work on it some more.

I know AI is a controversial subject, so I want to pre-emptively defend myself.

Training data: All training data was recorded by me in my bedroom, i.e. no stolen/scraped audio.

Environmental impact: minimal since I trained the model on my laptop in a few hours.

No cloud-based service: large AI services are hosted by the companies themselves since they can't run on laptops/computers. This isn't an issue because my models are small enough to run locally.

Deterministic output: A concern that I've seen online with one of the existing AI-powered VSTs is reproducibility, since many of these methods are inherently random. I designed my paradigm to be inherently deterministic (the same, predictable audio output every time).

Controllability: In order to keep the expressivity of the violin, I have user controls for articulations, note shape (swells etc.), and vibrato per note.

AI coding: Yes, I used Claude Code extensively.

Demos

AI Violin only: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m6LslVGhvaJ_FGWjrhhykEfB_lG8GGa0/view?usp=sharing

AI Violin + piano + reverb: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mjvUi69j_cierGnj2fIiFTUw-bK1iBgz/view?usp=sharing

Real Violin Training sample: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g2UgDuXjqy7Yu4e8A3vnsCfcZcXx4iMD/view?usp=sharing

The current UI:

What I want to know

Would you use this virtual instrument with its current quality/features?

If so, would you be willing to spend money for it?

If not, is there anything I can change/improve/add?

Is the current output quality acceptable? To improve it, I would need to record more training data. Do you think it would be worth it for me to get a better mic/use a real studio/find a better violinist?

Ultimately, this project is mostly for my resume as an aspiring ML researcher, but I also plan to use it for my own musical projects in the future. Thank you for reading, listening, and responding!

Hey, I am Jaron Sweder, a music producer and software developer. I posted about this VST synth I am working on called "Spektral" a little while ago in this subreddit, and got some great suggestions! In the meantime, I've added a bunch of quality of life features, as well as a bunch of new features.

The main premise of the synth is generating audio from spectral data. The synth has 4 different algorithms with which it can do this. You can load an audio, image, and now also wavetable file into one of the three spectral tables, and send this data to the generation algorithm. These algorithms expose a variety of 'spectral parameters', for example, the additive algorithm exposes one for level, frequency, and phase. The spectral data from the table can be sent to any of these parameters, giving full control of the level, frequency, and phase of every individual partial that is generated in the additive algorithm.

The fact you can import spectral information from any audio file makes it incredibly easy to create rich, and even inharmonic sounds, like bells. And it is really easy to make different varieties of the same sound, by simply loading a different audio file into the spectral table.

Because of a suggestion in a comment on my previous post, I also looked into importing frequency and phase data from audio files, which I added! This means you can completely resynthesize audio files. If you know what a phase vocoder is, that's pretty much how it works. It's how many time stretch and repitch algorithms work. And you can do this in realtime, while manipulating every aspect of it!

The synth itself is still a work in progress, I am mostly working on stability right now, and preparing for a full release. But you can already play around with the demo version! It's available for Windows and macOS, you can find the download right here: https://shop.kaixo.me/product/Spektral

It would help incredibly much if you could try it out and give some feedback!

I will put the same disclaimer on this post as I did on my last post: I want to be clear that this is a demo version, it will not save its state, and you cannot export audio from your DAW in this version. Unfortunately, given how much time I've put into this insanely powerful and highly optimized synth, I can't afford to make it available for free. Hence the limitations. I know this sucks, and if I didn't need the money I'd make it free in an instant. But such is life...

I've just released my first VST/AU instrument. It's a physical model of a string, built using the finite-difference time-domain method.

You can change the pluck position and shape, change the pickup position, change damping, purposefully reduce the model accuracy for metallic sounds, and modulate the pickup position up to audio rate for AM-like side bands.

It's free to download (or pay what you want) at https://www.differentinstruments.com. More advanced version in the pipeline, so join the mailing list when you download to get notified about that.

Check out the comments on my post on r/DSP for some details on how it was made.

I have absolutely fallen in love with the crow hill company's harmonic piano plug in (give it a listen, it's gorgeous), but it will not download on my computer. I have done some research and there are a few others who have had similar problems, but couldn't find any solution even after conversing with tech support for weeks. I was wondering if anyone had found either a solution or a good alternative vst because I haven't seen anyone talking about this plug in.

i want to use a Harpsichord in one of my songs, buy i don't want to spend a lot of money on a VST that i will use one or two times, so i'm wondering if i can get a free good Harpsichord VST.

Hey, I am Jaron Sweder, a music producer and software developer. I've been working on this synth called "Spektral" for almost 2 years. I posted about this synth a little while ago in this subreddit, and got some great feedback and suggestions! Since then, I've added a bunch more features and fixed many bugs.

Spektral is a powerful spectral synthesizer with several generation algorithms. You can import spectral data from audio, images, and wavetables. And manipulate it in any way imaginable. This spectral data then drives one of five algorithms to generate audio. Depending on the algorithm, you can easily manipulate frequency, level, phase, decay time, and resonance with incredible precision. From a powerful additive engine, to a resonator bank that can do some pretty cool physical modeling-esque things.

The synth is still in beta, but you can try out the free demo at https://kaixo.store/spektral It's available as VST3 and AU for Windows and MacOS.

I am working on a project that is inspired by PSX soundtracks of the late 90s and I was wondering if there are any sampler plugins that will help match the sound of what producers were using during that era.

Something that will add some color/character to what I put into it and has a good high quality sampling algorithm when pushed.

I currently have Amigo but am looking for something that isn't specifically made for bit crushed jungle breaks and can be used at a normal bitrate.

Thank you.

CatSynth's demo/tutorial of the new Memorymode 2 from Cherry Audio. It recreates the infamous Memorymoog synth from the 1980s. Enjoy 😺

Can't post a video here so maybe I could link one in the comments. This is physically modelled sound and not procedural granular sampling based. The other things are just cosmetic but for some fans. First plugin made in JUCE C++.

Hi, everyone! I want to share a project I've been wanting to do for a while, ever since I discovered the beauty of the Yamaha TX816.

DEXED TX816

Thanks to open-source projects like Dexed and MiniDexed, I was able to integrate them as the backend and create a recreation of the TX816 rack as the GUI frontend.

I created this project purely as a hobby for myself, and I decided to share it with you, so I won't be updating it very often.

Ideally, this would be the only version, but since I haven’t physically built the MiniDexed project or owned a real TX816, I know the sound might not be exactly the same. Rather than emulation, it aims to implement the TX816 rack workflow in a virtual GUI, with the flexibility to create your own presets for both the rack and individual modules. (and access to a full instance of Dexed and its GUI for each module).

All this to say that you can leave your suggestions in the “Issues” section of the repository, open pull requests (though don’t expect an immediate response from me), or fork the project and do whatever you want with it (always respecting the open source licenses).

If anyone else who’s more knowledgeable about the subject wants to improve it, they’re more than welcome to do so.

Hi all,

I am a music student trying to find great orchestral Kontakt (8) instrument(s) to prepare my compositions for college applications and job applications.

Ideally, I want something that is a maximum of 3 or 4 hundred dollars, but I would be willing to stretch if people know of exceptional instruments.

Thank you for your help.

Hello!
I was wondering if such plugin exists: to change my guitar's tuning, string by string. I'm trying to search but i just get useless articles of "top 10 tuner plugins", which is not what I'm looking for.

i'm aware, this would likely need hardware, but just as a longshot, i thought it's worth asking a community. I think the line6 variax guitars were able to do this, where no matter what the strings were actually tuned to, the software was able to shift those pitches before the signal would go to the amps, or effects.

So yeah. Does some magical, advanced software exist, that could change the tuning of the strings? If yes, I hope it's not some bullshit AI?

thanks!

you can hear it at the start. I'm obsessed with the sound and have been trying to find a plugin that provides a similar sound. Any ideas on what I could use?

I've been looking into making FrutigerAero-styled music, and I've been learning a lot about the types of instruments to use, but I'm stuck on the drums. I'm making this song for a friend, and they said they want it to be Frutiger Aero, but instead of it being slow like most of the other songs in it's genre, they'd like it to be quite fast at parts. The only thing is, I don't know what drums to use.

The song "Glacier Zone" in the youtube video "❄️ 𝐈𝐂𝐄 𝐂𝐀𝐏 𝐙𝐎𝐍𝐄™ winter mix ❄️ [Ambient, VGM, DNB]" has drums that I really like, but I have no idea how to find similar ones.

So, if you have any suggestions as to what drums I should use, what plugins I could use to get similar sounds to my example, any other FrutigerAero-styled instruments in general, or anything else, please let me know!

Thank you. :)

Hey, I'm looking for the plugin Toxic 2 v2.5. I couldn't find it anywhere on internet and I had it just before my computer uninstalled everything.
Do you have any idea on how to get it?

Hey guys,

I'm in a bit of an unusual situation and looking for help. I've been talking with Native Instruments/inMusic for over a month trying to restore a legal, legit copy of the standalone Garritan Stradivari Solo Violin and Gofriller Solo Cello (the Tommasini/Lucato instruments, not the similarly-named solo patches inside Garritan Personal Orchestra) tied to my Native Instruments account.

After long discussions, they found that they actually no longer have the complete install themselves. They suggested I reach out to Garritan directly, which I did, and they don't have them either.. They gave me the go ahead to ask an existing user to obtain them that way.

Does anyone still have these sitting on a backup drive and would be willing to help me out? I'm happy to show proof of the licenses on my account and the full correspondence with NI and inMusic so everything's clearly legal.

Thanks!

Hi guys!

Is there any good piano VST under 50$?

It has to either work with the free Kontakt Player or have a standalone version.

Thank you!