Surge XT

[Imaginus]

Hi! Any chance to see Surge XT ported as a plugin for the mod?

[mj_prod]

Hello @Imaginus ,

a quick glance over the Plugin OS compatibilities and, alas, incompatibilities
shows following:

LV2 sort of works, but has a collection of difficulties in modifying internal state which may make saving and restoring plugin state - especially in Ardour - inconsistent. We do not recommend using the LV2 plugin at this point in time!

I don’t know the differences of the moddevices architecture to what a Raspberry Pi offers and if Surge XT has been optimized recently for ARM processors.
Maybe a more keys / synth oriented platform like zynthian would be the way to go for you as it runs there. It might be a lot of work, but I’d be happy to see it running on moddevices products, too.

But that are just my 2 cents as a happy Mod / Mod X user.

Greetings and God bless, Marius

[khz]

@Imaginus

Surge XT

ModDuo as usb midi host for Linnstrument and Haken Continuumini?

MPE is possible for sure, there is zero technical reasons why it would not be. The MIDI decoding and message passing steps are all fine, LV2 format and plugins will receive the MIDI bytes as-is unaffected and all that. It is just that we do not have a single plugin that supports MPE in the plugin store right now. So yes, it is all possible and in a way “supported”, but the plugins are lacking on this area. I have helped a bit to make Surge working as LV2, but didnt work so well. Their next i…

I have helped a bit to make Surge working as LV2, but didnt work so well. Their next iteration, labelled Surge XT, is switching from custom code to JUCE, so an LV2 version likely to become official.
Surge, Vital, and other open-source synths that support MPE are very complex beasts though, the porting process to the MOD platform would requite a lot of work for which we do not have the resources to allocate to right now.
One thing that brings me hope is running JUCE GUI code directly on the browser.
This demo page is pretty impressive Emscripten-Generated Code
So perhaps we can reuse the full desktop GUI of a few plugins… that would save 95% of the porting work for JUCE based plugins.

[dreamer]

SurgeXT needs to move to JUCE7 first, which may happen this year. However then there would be “native” LV2 builds possible (support by default JUCE).

Biggest issue is how the hell will you control this? It has so many parameters. Without a functioning UI this would be pretty much unusable. There is the suggestion of having a webasm version of the UI, but how would this connect to the DSP?
Also many patches may be too heavy for a MOD unit to properly handle.

A lot of problems to solve before SurgeXT would be usable then. But I agree it would be a very cool synth to have on the MOD platform. One day

[Imaginus]

I see. My interest was sparked from a the fact that Roger Linn, creator of the Linnstrument, Linndrum, MPC etc is choosing/recommending Surge XT as a “main” software to work with for the Linnstrument. At the same time there are few standalone MPE synths. So I thought a move for Mod in this direction could gain new users, although perhaps being rather niece. Anyway enjoying the ride with this company and hoping the best for the future!