Re: [Haskell-cafe] wondering on Haskell kickstarter project: VST plugin / mobile synthesizer

@Evan Thanks for detailed and sincere reply. I can see your points. That VST/mobiles market is very crowded business and it's really hard to compete with super giants especially when you don't provide any significant change or creative opportunity in the app. So I think this project is going to be more a prove of the concept and example that it's really possible to create real-time audio with Haskell and wrap it in non-Haskell UI. Hope I would manage to do the mobile version of it too some days. I would really like to add non equal temeprament scales, I feel that it can make a difference to the mood of the music. Maybe it's better to look in the direction of media installations. The Python has many cool libraries for non-trivial user interaction like computer vision. It would be great to stream this data in Haskell generated synthesizer. Maybe something can be created in this area. Anton 2015-12-20 21:41 GMT+03:00 Evan Laforge :

It sounds hard to get enough interest for significant funding, because it's a niche of a niche. And, at least if I am anything to go by, the niche is occupied by especially iconoclastic sorts. For instance, even though I'm very much interested in that kind of thing, and would like to do something myself, I would only do it for the the purpose of using something better than MIDI, because there are already tons of MIDI using VSTs out there. Doing something different would give an opportunity to easily support things that are awkward in MIDI, and offline incremental rendering would allow expensive synthesis and unlimited polyphony. Also it would be nice to have a programmable sampler which is not as hilariously terrible as kontakt.

So I wouldn't really be personally interested, unless it had some unique gimmick that made it more interesting than all the existing VSTs, or if perhaps it were about establishing low level libraries that would make it easier to do what I'm interested in. In fact your existing work with csound-sampler is already somewhat along those lines since it makes all the csound stuff available with a nice haskell frontend.

But even then... though I wish you luck and I do support the general idea of more of this kind of thing happening, software development is really expensive. It seems to me pretty much the only way it can work is for an interested individual to do on their own for free. Either that, or an established product with aiming at the most mainstream possible market, e.g. ardour. And even then it will likely struggle.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 3:22 AM, Anton Kholomiov wrote:

...

I'm wondering if it's good idea to make crowd-founding project for a synthesizer written in Haskell. What's your opinion? Would you like to support such a project?

I've made a prototype:

https://github.com/anton-k/tiny-synth

It's a desktop synthesizer, a collection of instruments. About 150 instruments written in Haskell. It works with midi keyboard. You can try it out with USB-midi device.

The UI is written with Python and audio engine is written with Haskell. I use my library csound-expression to generate the code for Csound. The Csound is an audio programming language it can be used as C library. There are bindings to many languages and it can work on Android / iOS.

Right now I've made a prototype for desktop. The big plan is to create VST/AU/Lv2 plugins and mobile versions for Android and iOS.

[1] https://github.com/anton-k/tiny-synth [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/csound-expression [3] https://github.com/spell-music/csound-expression

Cheers, Anton

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