30 1-bit voices? Awesome!

cool sounds! that thing might get me to use a vst again, after maybe 3 years of abstinence

Awesome job, sounds great so far. Can't wait to try it out when it's completed!

Very cool!!!

Nope, synthedit is windows only.

Still cool!

Sounds awesome! Forgive if I'm jumping ahead here, but is there any chance of an OSX port? ^.^;;;

buzz buzz buzz

This is great

sounds cool :-)

I've picked up work on Nautilus again. My goal for it is to create a usable VSTi platform for writing 1-bit tracks with an instrument editor that allows for flexible waveform manipulation, so each voice can have its own character. I'd also like to stack a lot of channels on top of each other and still keep it listenable.
The basic idea is to have something to simulate a beeper in a DAW, but also allows you to go beyond that.

Shiru has a nice write-up for the first beta build (which you can download) here:
http://shiru.untergrund.net/1bit/pivot/entry.php?id=13

Although it worked ok-ish, there were some things I wasn't satisfied with.

The build allowed for about 4 or 5 simultaneous voices before it degraded to noise. Since I have the power of a DAW behind it, I wished for something more; how cool would it be to have 15 voices and drums play in 1-bit and it'd still sound good!
This is tricky. The nature of 1-bit waveforms makes stacking voices complicated. You either end up with a complete ON state, or noise if you make every other voice substractive. Also, I want to maintain the instrument character of each voice, which includes PWM; once you have many voices, the PW of each has to be reduced, which leaves less space for that and thins the sound. I started to experiment with dynamic PW size algorithms, depending on pitch, number of voices, total average of ON states and so on.

This took a lot of time. I tested various setups for quality of sound, based on binary logic, subtractive algorithms, MUXing.. you name it. Eventually I grew frustrated and moved on to other things. Recently, I hit a slump with writing music and started to play with Synthedit again. By chance I stumbled over a OSC setup that created a pleasing dynamic PW on voices, at which point I decided to pick up work on Nautilus again. I made some modifications to the auto-arp to make it fit better.

Here's a mp3 render of a 11 channel MIDI. Multiple voices on the same channel are auto-arpeggiated. This test doesn't have instruments (no detunig, PWM, vibrato, portamento or anything). Keep in mind that the MIDI file wasn't made to be played like that, so there are a few annoying notes. The main test here was to have about 30 voices playing in 1-bit without having it dissolve beyond recognition. (Check your volume, it's a bit loud)

Next thing to do is to CPU optimize the core, and then find a workable interface solution for instruments.

Also, sorry for the blog post, but usually I keep better at projects once I made some kind of public commitment