awesome-linuxaudio VS music-synthesizer-for-android

> Is there a highly-regarded software (or hardware + software) emulator for the DX7?

Dexed is probably what you're looking for, although there are others here: https://github.com/nodiscc/awesome-linuxaudio#synthesizers--...

These are not all free, but it's worth checking out. https://github.com/nodiscc/awesome-linuxaudio

regarding Ableton, I know some people are doing it but my advice is don't go for proton/wine if you can go native. there's tons of pro soft for linux: https://github.com/nodiscc/awesome-linuxaudio

This awesome-linuxaudio page has a number of quality programs that you can try.

I think the landscape is fairly good now actually. There's tons of good FOSS audio software, and for commercial DAWs we have Bitwig, REAPER, Renoise and Tracktion Waveform. And while there stil aren't that many commercial plugin developers out there that natively support Linux, you can get really far nowadays with the offerings from Bitwig, U-He, TAL, AudioDamage, Loomer, Pianoteq, Audio Assault and many more vendors. You can find are some non-exhaustive lists of vendors supporting Linux here, here and here. Since I too don't want to make compromises if I don't have to, I made yabridge last year which lets you use 32-bit and 64-bit Windows VST2 and VST3 as if they were native 64-bit Linux VST2 and VST3 plugins. I'm really happy with how that turned out, and the reception has been nothing but positive. Wine's getting really good, and the only things that can consistently make things difficult are invasive DRM schemes like iLoK and Waves' DRM. But yeah, even without yabridge there are plenty of good native DAWs and plugins for Linux right now.

This is for Cortex A8, which was the chip in the Nexus One. I wrote the original version of sound synthesis directly in ARM assembler[1]. It was very highly optimized, I remember using a cycle counting app that flagged any dependency chain that would cause the processor to stall, and ultimately utilization was in the 90%+ range. Back in those days, processors were simple enough you could do this kind of optimization by hand. By the time of Cortex A15 (Nexus 10 etc), instruction issue was out-of-order and much harder to reason about.

The best current info I could find for the latency advice is [2]. Quoting, "Moving data from NEON to ARM registers is Cortex-A8 is expensive..."

[1]: https://github.com/google/music-synthesizer-for-android/blob...

[2]: https://community.arm.com/support-forums/f/armds-forum/757/n...

Nice! A Google engineer also reverse engineered the DX-7 a while back, although I think it was just based on analyzing the behavior, not from the actual die itself like this. (I seem to recall there was more documentation/blog posts, but it looks like it was lost in the migration from Google Code to GitHub.) Later, someone used this as the core engine for the VST plugin Dexed.

The specific thing I've found least documented, yet most important for the distinctive percussive attacks of the DX7, is a random variation of the pitch envelope for the first few milliseconds of the note. That's almost short enough it could be done in the firmware, but I believe it might be in the hardware. It's not present in the msfa source, but might have been recovered by later Dexed authors (I haven't carefully looked at their code).

If you get to the envelope hardware, you'll find it's just as clever as the exponential and sine generators. There's some info at [1], but it doesn't capture every single thing I found - there are cases where there is a slight amount of additional noise in the amplitude, I'm not sure whether intentional to give more character or an unintentional artifact. That's also missing from the msfa source.

[1]: https://github.com/google/music-synthesizer-for-android/blob...