Synful Orchestra is a program that simulates symphonic wind and string instruments. It was first released in 2005. It is a plug-in program that requires a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) program such as Apple Logic, Cubase, Protools, Digital Performer, Ableton, Sonar, or Reaper. It supports three plugin formats: VST3, Audio Units, and AAX. It runs on Mac and Windows.

• Ultra-Realistic Instruments
• Slurs, tonguing, and bowing created automatically from standard MIDI. No special key switches or phrasing tools.
• Instruments include Piccolo, Flute, Oboe, English Horn, Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Bassoon, French Horn, Trumpet, Trombone, Bass Trombone, Tuba, Violin, Viola, Cello, Contrabass.
• Realistic string, brass, and woodwind sections. Any solo instrument can be made into a section with natural variation between players.
• Flexible player positioning. Solo instruments or section players are positioned on a virtual stage. Each instrument in the orchestra sounds like its coming from a specific location.
• Natural divisi. Play a line with ten violin players and they all play that line. Play a chord and the players arrange themselves automatically across the notes of the chord.
• Imaginary Instruments. Start with the real thing and then use Synful's controls to transform the sounds into fantastic imaginary instruments.
• Authentic rich vibrato. Controlled using the Mod Wheel.
• Imaginary Instruments and Otherworldly Sounds
• Patented Reconstructive Phrase Modeling technology. Uses database of recorded phrases. Fragments from the database are spliced together and resynthesized using additive synthesis.
• Innovative Controls. Harmonic Tilt, Harmonic Parity, Transient Noise Trim, Sustain Noise Trim, Gain, Tune, Pitch Wheel Range, Delay For Expression.
• Synful Pitch Wheel mode. For realistic portamento slurs and pitch slide effects. Midi look-ahead anticipates upcoming notes and begins note transitions early –like a real player.
• Entire orchestra fits in 120M of memory. and loads in seconds.
• 80-140 real-time voices. on 1.8GHz Intel Laptop
• MAC OSX 10.7 and later. Native 64 bit for ARM (M1, M2) and Intel
• Windows 7 and Later. Native 64 bit
• AU, VST3, AAX plugin formats.
• Many example projects included.
  

https://www.synful.com

 

Simply great! Just listen to the orchestral examples, they're astonishing, (Partita for viola is awesome)!
I thought it was physmod, but it's not.
Great achievement in sound engineering, and it was so long ago.

A Letter From Eric Lindemann, Synful CEO

 

Last edited: Aug 8, 2023

At first I thought that for 120MB for an entire orchestra it just must be a gimmick of some sort, bad GM sounds or cheap physical models or something.

But fuck me, it's actually very very good and expressive. Not that I create realistic orchestral music, just need something for the occasional video work.

 

Thanks for head-up @webhead

 

I guess we'll have to study well how to deal with controllers, they're the key to expressive playing.
Actually I think that one day I'll get a Seabord, I think the most advanced real time controller at this time.

Edit: read the comments beside the examples, they give hints on their performance.

 

Last edited: Aug 8, 2023

Damn, a Seaboard would be so fucking cool. Any ROLI actually.

But on my first impressions with just a normal MIDI keyboard it's very impressive, dynamics the volume and timbre of course, but it also seems to react to your style of playing, short notes do turn into kind of like plucked staccato notes and so on.

 

I played the horn demo.

It blowed me away. Instinctively downloaded it.

Never expected a free software to have such impact and that too from modeled sounds. Put those with a bit of Reverb in a track. I guess it will do nicely in a POP track

 

In addition, it puts almost no load on your processor.

 

Not expecting you to do anything about it. old machine, and I rarely use Orchestra instruments anyway. But this shows "Cannot be Opened" on Logic 10.4, macOS 10.13.6. I did all the usual tricks and even rebooted. The plugin manager sees the plugin, but AUValTool rejects it, and the error code is meaningless. It's not marked as crashing validation.

 

What a great day! immeasurable contribution... this is pure gold!
Mission accomplished, dear Eric Lindemann. You made the joy of millions with this treasure!
Note: and open source (patents released!)! Have you thought about what an AI could do by incorporating synful's database?

Spoiler

for now, maybe music of dubious quality with incredible sounds... But, in the future, with the mirroring of human neural networks to AIs, who knows what else will come!

 

Last edited: Aug 8, 2023

Downloaded earlier, runs fine as VST3 plugin with "Element" (thanks @eXACT_Beats_) with Win 7 x64.

And of course many thanks to @webhead !

I'm not allowed to vote, so a replacement - Thumbs up!

 

https://www.synful.com/synful-demos
https://www.synful.com/technology

Can you imagine the synful technology —Reconstructive Phrase Modeling (RPM)— threatening the multi-million dollar business of paid sample libraries?

 

Last edited: Aug 8, 2023

Well I knew about Synful Orchestra, and I thougth that was a kind of physmod thing, something that is not.
Whatever physmod or RPM, that's the way I would like every virtual instrument be constructed.

I didn't like samplers even when they were new kids, though I owned a pair and played some others (the first I put hands on was ensoniq mirage).

Now many sample libraries are absurdely good, still, I think that if there is a future in sound engineering, it will be by math reconstruction.

I just checked if SO is working in Reaper, (it's ok), but it will take longer to really play it.


Million thanks again to the (genius) Eric Lindemann!!!

 

I got and tried it. It's a great resource, but up against LASS 3 Library 20 gigs, It still needs a lot of processing to get a similar sound
160 MB
20 GIG

 

The audio demos sound fantastic. How come I never heard of this being an abolute audio plugins and instrument nerd? Maybe lack of marketing / advertisment?

I will have to download it as soon as I got the spare time to test drive it thoroughly, but if it can do what the demos suggest, than this is truely mind-blowing, specially at the small size. But hey, they say that sometimes big things come in small packages, right?

 

You mean "processing" in terms of mixing or in terms of MIDI editing (for example editing of articulation, expression etc)?

 

The problem with sample libraries: in order to sound realistic you need a very deep level of sampling: many velocity layers, round-robins and for each semitone individually (as opposed to stretching one note over multiple semitones).

It takes lots of effort to record and develop such a quality library and then when it's finished you will end up with a multiple gigabyte library that requires a highend computer with lots of RAM and ultrafast CPU.

So access to such quality sounds is out of reach for many hobbyists and semi-pros with a limited budget for music production.

 

Yeah I would be interested too for the answer.

I swear I'll get into SO asap to get the most useful hints, but first I'll have to RTFM.
I'm too excited.

 

Thanks for info, this is good for users

 

eq, compression delay reverb this kind of thing.