[sdiy] "Volta" circuit simulator for Mac OS X

[Rutger Vlek]

On 29 apr 2012, at 20:58, Ingo Debus wrote:

> 
> Am 27.04.2012 um 22:20 schrieb Lanterman, Aaron:
> 
>> Anyone try this and if so what did you think?
>> 
>> http://kulfx.com/volta
> 
> While we're at the subject of circuit simulation, has anyone here tried Texas Instruments' Tina-TI? I'm under the impression that most of you are using LTSpice (I do too). Recently I had a look at Tina-TI, mostly because I was forced to, more or less. I wanted to simulate a TI chip from which only encrypted Spice models exist which LTSpice could not read.
> 
> At first glance Tina-TI looks less clumsy than LTSpice. Like LTSpice, it's free, has a schematics editor and as I understand it it can read and generate WAV files. Any opinions?

I have used Tina-TI for simulating a VCF, VCA and overdrive circuit and like the concept very much. The option to generate WAV files (or import them as source signals) is extremely nice for synth development. The interface is rather good and pretty intuitive (as good as it gets with these kinds of applications IMHO). The only downside is that I never managed to find a way to import non-standard TI component models (like an LM13700 OTA model for instance), I was forced to construct something alike from discrete transistors. The other downside is that the version I'm using (pretty recent, only a couple of months old) is a still a bit buggy. With large schematics the copy-paste functionality sometimes stops working and a few settings (like the path to WAV files for a signal generator) are not properly recalled after loading a project. It also seems like TINA-TI is a light version of a third-party program (not Texas) with much more capabilities. Might be worth looking at as well, although it's not free.

Rutger