CulSynth

CulSynth is currently a DSP library and nih-plug based virtual instrument written in Rust.

Goals

The eventual goal is to create a synthesizer that can be deployed both as a virtual instrument and on embedded hardware, to allow users to prototype sound designs with the expressiveness of physical knobs and hardware then seamlessly move those patches into a virtual instrument inside a DAW for further use without requiring sampling or reprogramming.

Usage

The plugin can either be used as a standalone binary by building and then running the culsynth-standalone binary, or can be used as a VST3/CLAP plugin. Currently only VST3 is being tested. Generating the plugin is simple: just build it for your platform then copy the generated .so or .dll file to your VST plugins folder:

On Linux:

$ cargo build --release
$ cp target/release/libculsynth_plugin.so ~/.vst3/culsynth.vst3

On Windows:

> cargo build --release
> copy target\release\libculsynth_plugin.dll C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\culsynth.vst3

Licensing

This project is licensed under the MIT License. However, due to the licensing of the bindings any plugins built in VST3 format are licensed under the terms of the GPLv3. It incorporates several dependencies under the MIT, Apache v2, BSD, ISC, Boost, and ZLib licenses.

This project incorporates fonts from the Noto Project and Google under the terms of the SIL Open Font License v1.1 (see resources/fonts/OFL.txt).

Dependencies

For Rust dependencies, see Cargo.toml.

On Linux, the following packages (Debian names provided, but should be similar on other distros) need to be installed in order to successfully compile:

• libx11-xcb-dev
• libxcb-icccm4-dev
• libxcb-dri2-0-dev

Future Work

• Documentation - currently exists, but very light on specifics/examples
• Better UI for modulation - currently must manually edit the matrix
• Fixed point profiling/optimization
• More MIDI CC implementations, patch memory, etc.
• Port to RPi Pico
• WebASM backend (explore feasibility)