Brain Control releases Tunefish 3 Virtual Analog Synthesizer VSTi

Demoscene group Brain Control has released Tunefish 3, a free additive synthesizer in VSTi plugin format for Windows.

Tunefish is a very tiny virtual analog synthesizer. It is developed to fit into about 10kb of compressed machine code while still producing an audio quality that can compete with commercial synthesizers. This site was created to make the VSTi version of it available to the public. This VSTi, unlike the version of TF which is used in 64k intros of our group Brain Control is of course larger, mainly because it is based on the Qt framework for C++ to make the GUI possible.

The synth comes currently as more of an experimental version without any warranties. It is tested on Renoise but if you want to use it with different programs, please do so and let us know about your experience. Tunefish is an ongoing project under active development so if you have any comments or wishes, please let use know. Also, if you make some music with it or create soundbanks you’re more than welcome to share them here.

I still haven’t tested Tunefish 3, but sever KVR Forum members have reported that it sounds good and that it is very easy on the CPU. The dev states that some of the development was performed on an Atom processor, to ensure a low CPU hit.

It is coded in C++ entirely using SSE intrinsics for optimization. That reminds me, I should mention it requires a CPU capable of SSE2. But then again, who does not have one of those? Even my single core Atom CPU can handle those. As a side info: I did large parts of the development on a single core Atom CPU to force myself to write effective code. It’s really a lot more fun if you optimize and you see you can finally add a couple more voices to your song instead of the CPU just going down from 10% to 8% like it does on a really fast multicore cpu.

Tunefish 3 is available for free download via Brain Damage.

Audio Demo

Check out the Tunefish 3 audio demo:

Features

Main features of Tunefish 3:

• It’s implemented as a VST instrument so can be used in your favorite sequencer
• It uses a spline based oscillator that can by configured very dynamically.
• Additionally to normal sine, sawtooth, triangle and pulse waveforms, it can do anything that is possible with 6 points and step/linear/spline interpolation.
• The Noise generator can produce any frequency of noise with any bandwidth
• Lowpass, Highpass, Bandpass and Notch filters are availanle
• 4 ADSRs and 4 LFOs that can be linked to pretty much any importand knob using a modulation matrix
• Supported effects are Flanger, Chorus, Distortion, Delay, Reverb, EQ and Formant
• The effects stack allows for any permutation of up to 10 effects

Links

Download Tunefish 3: click here