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What are the best sounding synths that use the least amount of memory?
I want to see how much I can get genome driving only on my ipad.
What are some recommendations for lightweight synths?
Comments
15 channels of NS' Eden < one instance of iSem (resource wise, and it's hardly 1/15 the synth).
Sir Sampleton (sample per MIDI channels 1-12)
Sunrizer without effects and lowered polyphony
nLog Pro
Think 'what used to work on an iphone 3GS?' as a starting place.
A lot also depends on the patch/sound you are using. Complex pads with long releases will eat more CPU than a short simple sound.
Good point re complexity.
Also, not sure if you need them to be live 'synths' or not but remember that you can sample synths into ThumbJam and use up to 8 channels at once in there.
Polyphony (number of notes playing at once) is another factor. And it's one that can often be adjusted from mono to (I think) about 8 notes for Sunrizer, Magellan, Caustic, etc.
But there really is no rhyme or reason to which synths require more memory to run. The fact that they are a smaller file size doesn't necessary mean that they load less information into RAM. For example, the four main VirSyn synths require very little disc space, but will jam up an iPad2 from time to time. Thor (from Propellerhead) is another great synth that seems to be resource-hungry.
At the same time, Animoog is considering one of the better sounding synths out there, and has a lot going on with the presets and timbres, but it is an older app and seems to like my iPad2 pretty well.
The more important factor is not which app it is, but how it is being used. Pretty much any synth will perform fine on most devices if you're just playing it live. But if you're using AudioBus or IAA, you just need to keep latency settings in mind and be realistic about what your device can handle.
Latency is another good point. If you're sequencing from Genome and not playing live, start Audiobus before anything else and set the latency to the highest setting. There will be a delay between pressing play and hearing audio but you'll get a lot more out of your system.
BS-16i seems to get a lot going at once pretty easily. NLogPro is another lightweight. In fasct, any synth that can still run on an iPad 1 is going to be light on RAM, given they have typically only about 75MB to play with. Like these on my iPad 1. Note Thor is there too. Simpler patches only, an get resource hungry but can also be lightweight. YMMV.
@dwarman said:
Hi, Dave, I have the opposite experience with BS-16i when using soundfonts, even relatively small ones.
I haven't found a single soundfont player that doesn't have memory issues on the iPad.
If I understand what you're trying to achieve correctly, I'd have thought that synths that allow multiple independent versions of themselves addressed on different midi channels might be the way to go e.g. :
I'm a big fan of Thor - I expected it to crawl on my old iPad 2 but it works a treat.
Quality/footprint one winner for me: Sunrizer
Magellan is skinny too but I don't like the synth personally. It is a great lightweight fx processors for vox/acc guitar/synth though.
Sunrizer I love, but my iPad struggles with some of the bigger pads.
@johnfromberkeley I'm really surprised at that. One of the original genome videos had the dev driving all 16 channels separately on an iPad 1 or 2