[sdiy] digital synth design.

[Paul Maddox]

Alwyn

> i have been recently looking for something like a alesis nanopiano to get
> some "piano" sounds.  I then began thinking (which was a bit silly) and
> was pondering the feasability of making something like a rompler.

hehe, been there, often :-)

> What would be cool as a device would be something that you can plug in a
> standard format USB stick with patch definition tables or similar and raw
> waveforms on it and then be able to play it out.  Unfotunatly usb(1.1)
> isn't well known for its huge bandwidth but some rough calculations i did
> would let you get about 8 streams of 16bit 48Khz audio out...  not quite
> enough for proper piano simulation, but it would be cool for pads etc..

one downside is that you would need to run the USB HOST, this has a large
overhead, not noticeable on a modern PC, but certainly noticeable on a small
micro.
FWIW something like CF cards have a lot lower processor overhead, and CF
readers seem to be cheap enough..
The other option is to consider something like a small hard disk and some
RAM, YAMPP runs a fat filesystem with a reasonable sized hard disk, and make
the it a USB device, and upload the samples to it from your PC/Mac.

Paul