[sdiy] Difficulty of creating an iPad synth?

[Olivier Gillet]

> What I am wondering is - just how difficult is it to create a synth
> for the iphone/pad?  Are there canned routines that help things
> along or is it all pretty low level programming that only guys
> with tons of experience will successfully complete?

You'd probably need to start by writing a VSTi or AU, this way you
could focus straight on the actual audio coding rather than on the
user interface. You get called everytime there's a 1024 samples buffer
to compute and here you go!

>From there, developing for iPad/iPhone is not much more difficult.
What gets slightly more annoying is that:
- you have to do your own UI, which can get boring. Soldering pots and
switches is way more fun than drawing them in Photoshop.
- unless you are using a cross-platform development library like NUI,
you have to test on the device which can get frustrating.
- you have limited computational power compared to a desktop computer,
but hey, it's not an 8-bit AVR :)

So I don't think there's any platform-specific difficulty, and the
problems you'll encounter are the same as those faced by developers on
desktop systems - how to do band-limited oscillators, digital
simulation of filters, at which rate to recompute LFOs, and what's a
good envelope shape... Hang on the music-dsp list and on KVR Audio and
feel the vibe...

The main difference with whatever is discussed here with
microcontrollers: the processors in the iPad/iPhone have floating
point units, so we can code with floats, and most of the
tricks/optimizations discussed here no longer apply.

Maybe there is, or there will be, something like Reaktor or Synthedit,
but you can sell on the App store only apps developed using Apple's
native development tools, so back to (Objective)-C.

Olivier