part of a balanced breakfast::03.09.2008+23:56
Over the recent holiday break, I began writing a synthesizer. Mostly it was out of wanting to learn how, and also just because I thought it’d be a fun time. It finally has support for MIDI input and some rudimentary documentation. It’s actually two components, libwaffle, which is the actual modular synthesizer, and a frontend called Breakfast. Waffle came out of my needing something for the ScoreCode interpreter I wrote to power, and it’s the core of Breakfast. It’s a modular synthesizer that offers enough modules to do interesting things, although it could probably use more. It also doesn’t allow for feedback loops as the final module graph needs to be a DAG that feeds into a single output module. Waffle outputs to a single Jack output port, although that might change in the future.
Breakfast is an interactive environment for working with Waffle. It has textual commands for managing patches and the linking of parameters to actual events. It uses ALSA for MIDI, and is pretty robust. Patches are programmed in Lua and loaded at runtime. The essential idea is that Breakfast makes Waffle actually useful.
Right now, neither is available on the project wiki. They’re both in states that I’d rather not have in the wild, not to mention that I haven’t come up with licenses to use for either. As far as I know, there’s only one person who’s getting a copy of both, and he’s also part of the reason why I coded them. If you can’t live without having a copy of it, then e-mail me and I’ll send you GPL licensed versions of both.