[sdiy] SF Bay Area Alert: Dave Smith at CCRMA today

[Donald Tillman]

On Jun 4, 2014, at 4:14 PM, Doug Terrebonne <dougt55 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> > technology. He then took over as President at Seer Systems and developed
> > the world's first software based synthesizers.
> 
> Sorry I have to call BS on that. There were software synths well before Seer. Digidesign's SoftSynth and TurboSynth come to mind...


I don't know much about this area, but let's consider the context.

DigiDesign's SoftSynth is not real time, right?  It crunches and writes out to a file as it goes, and you get to play the file back later.  I'm guessing Dave Smith was only considering a software synth that could be used in performance.

And is TurboSynth similar, or does it require DSP hardware or something?

Also, his talk was strictly about commercial products, he's not including lab or academic work.

So does the use of the phrase "first software based synthesizer" simply imply commercial, real time, and no hardware support?  

  -- Don

--
Don Tillman
Palo Alto, California
don at till.com
http://www.till.com