The reason why I was looking for DST capability: I have to give a lecture at my school
next week about synthesis techniques, and I wanted to show some tricks that are not
exactly standard (even though they've been around since Stockhausen was cutting up
little bits of tape, but never mind that). Such as: run a fixed-frequency band-limited
impulse through a high-Q bandpass filter to play melodies on the impulse's harmonic
series.[1]
I can do this easily in SuperCollider, but I don't want the students to come away with
the impression that you have to learn programming to do synthesis. So that's out.
I can do this easily in Abysnth under Windows, but could not get it to work well in
Linux.
I looked at a couple of native Linux softsynths and... I have to say... I was sorely
disappointed. It wasn't evident to me how to generate a bandlimited impulse in
ZynAddSubFx; the documentation seems to indicate that this synth is built on totally
different principles. Wavetable synths like WhySynth are hampered by the inability to
import custom wavetables and by impossible-to-control mapping of MIDI note numbers onto
filter frequency.
I had a quick look at the webpages for Ingen, but there are no packages and I was burned
out on build failures at that point, so I didn't go further.
For the moment, I need to plug ahead with Windows so it's a question mainly for my own
curiosity, but... did I overlook a really good softsynth package, or have I stumbled onto
a gaping hole in the Linux audio ecosystem?
hjh
[1] Underworld, "Rez."