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Welcome/Blog/6 July 2023 - VividShaper
VividShaper has finally been submitted to App Store. I hope that it will be released soon.
Three years ago, I started to conceptualise VividShaper. I was inspired by Dave Smith's Evolver, which is a hardware wavetable synthesizer and wanted to do something similar:
Here is a video of someone demonstrating the Evolver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA64CyOzacI
Therefore, I wanted to create a wave table AUv3 synthesizer where the user could easily update the waves. The wave size in VividShaper is actually the same as in the Evolver, which is 128 samples per wave. However, instead of uploading samples with 128 sampling points, I thought that the user could generate the waves in the Lua programming language. This meant that the Lua code needed to update many times per seconds to allow the waves to evolve.
My first idea was to create a monophonic synth. I couldn't really see how it would work out to generate several waves from different generators. I also didn't understand the need of more than one oscillator. However, I realised soon that I needed to go polyphonic, which was solved by running a Lua interpreter for each generator, and also allow for more than one oscillator within each generator to give a rich sound.
In the final version of VividShaper that I now submit to App Store, you can play up to eight notes at a time and each note may have up to eight oscillators. You can also run it on both iOS and macOS. On macOS, it works great on both Logic Pro and Ableton Live. It got iCloud support so you can easily share your patches between your devices.