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Bristol Synthesiser Emulator.
bin/startBristol [-libtest] [-mini|-explorer|-prophet|-dx|-juno|-hammond|-mixer|-b3|-pro5|-vox|-rhodes] [-voices 1..anthing] [-bufsize <1024>] [-preload <4>]
bin/startBristol -v -h for a verbose help text.
Bristol is a synthesiser emulator application. It consists of several
libraries and a few binaries. This is release 0.8, and you may find problems
with it. Bristol is, correctly speaking, only the synthesis engine. The whole
GUI is another API call brighton, which renders images onto each other with
rotation, scaling, shading, etc, to generate the graphics.
Release 0.8 incorporates a Vox Continental organ and a Fender Rhodes electric
piano. Several bugfixes are include which should reduce the number of seg
faults you will see.
Bristol only uses PCM and rawmidi, no seq support yet. The dual manual hammond
(-b3 option) should now work correctly with one exception: that no sound can
be generated from the lower manual before at least one key is pressed on the
upper manual - to initialise the leslie.
Contributions would be highly appreciated - I could do with some people to
look over the diverse button and knob bitmaps, which have been generated with
gimp, and provide some better graphics. At the moment all the texture and
bitmap filenames are coded into the interface, but future releases will allow
for user reconfiguration of the look and feel using "skins". The API supports
this, but the brighton interface menuing system is still in its infancy.
If you generate any sounds that you would like to contribute to the default
memory banks of any synth, please email me (nick.copeland@ntlworld.com). The
memories are binary files in their respective memory directories of the
installation.
The -libtest option will just present the GUI and not activate the engine.
Bristol has been tested with ALSA 0.9 and OSS audio drivers.
You may also want to chown/chmod bin/bristolengine to suid root, to allow it
to use low latency scheduling. This will reduce audio underruns. You can also
consider increasing bufsize and preload to reduce this effect, but this will
lead to increased latency. Also, if you are using an SB Live! card with
ALSA 0.9 drivers you may need to configure a bufsize of 2048 (ie. 512 samples),
which can be compensated for by reducing preload to 2 or 1.
Bristol will currently run 16 voices on a P-II 450, and this is the default
voicecount. You can run any number of simultaneous synths - they all connect
to the same engine, they will all run with the same polyphony since the MIDI
voice structures allow for dynamic assignment of sounds to voices. You can run
with split keyboard (no interface at the moment), layering of multiple synths
on a single midi channel, etc. Some of the synths max out my P-II 450 CPU when
there is a lot of MIDI activity, notably the DX and Explorer at 16 voices.
You can start different synths with different voicecounts, so you could have
a 16 voice hammond, a monophonic minimoog, and a 5 voice prophet running at
the same time - the GUI will negotiate the voice allocation requirements with
the engine. The first synth you start will create the voice count. Subequent
synths can have less than the initial value. If you start a monophonic synth
first, you will only have one voice available at any time for all synths.
If you layer synths you will reduce your polyphony since the engine will
allocate multiple voices per keyed note.
Pressing the single letter 'q' in the GUI will send a quit signal and the
app will exit gracefully(?). When the last synths quits the engine will also
exit. If you press the single letter 'p' then libbrighton will dump a
screenshot to /tmp/<synthtype>.xpm (in XPM format only).
There is a LOT of debugging sent to stdout. You may want to consider adding
redirects to /dev/null in the bin/startBristol script to get rid of it. When
the final rev-1 is uploaded most of this will be taken out.
Requests, comments and features enhancements would be appreciated. Bug reports
as well.....
Currently bristol will emulate the following keyboards:
Moog Mini
Moog Voyager (Bristol "Explorer")
Sequential Circuits Prophet-5
Roland Juno-6
Yamaha DX-7 (Well, perhaps an FM-7)
Hammond (single manual)
Hammond B3 (dual manual - see below)
Vox Continental
Fender Rhodes
All names are trademarks of their respective owners. Bristol does not maintain
that it is an emulation of the sounds of the original equipment, rather that
it synthesises sound by emulating the original generation stages. If you want
the true original sound then you may need the original instrument. If you want
all of them for nothing then bristol is an alternative.
The B3 implementation uses two synthesisers, both of which collapse into the
same single output. This is done to ensure both manuals go through the same
leslie rotary speaker. At the moment you will not get any sound out of the
lower manual until at least one key is pressed on the upper manual - this
will initialise the leslie. A future release could correct this if there is
sufficient demand.
The DX implementation is rather stretching the fact. This is a 6 operator FM
synthesiser, but the operators are somewhat different from the original Yamaha
DX model. As yet very few example sounds have been provided, and only the first
eight algorithms have been implemented.
The Rhodes implementation is actually a DX player. It has a number of fixed
configurations for Rhodes, electric piano and accoustic piano sounds.
Other synths will follow, including drum machines, synths, mixers and realtime
FX processing.
Current developments are to integrate a realtime and non-realtime hard disk
recorder, which really just means a new interface for SLab using brighton, and
a new engine using bristol. You can see the interface is you start bristol with
the -mixer option. The mixer is not operational yet, but you can view it with
the -libtest option.
Bristol and brighton are released with full GPL source code.
nick copeland
nick.copeland@ntlworld.com
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