[sdiy] Two questions about the list

[Eddy Robinson]

Thanks very much to all who replied to my qestion about list etiquette. I'll
give a very short explanation of my commercial interest, and if it's OK with
the rest of the list I'll post a short announcement of the website shortly;
it is being redesigned at present.

I work a company called Soundart. In December 2001 we plan to launch a
product called the Chameleon. It is a rack unit with 12 buttons, 4 knobs and
rotary encoder, MIDI i/o and stereao audio i/o (24-bit). Inside is a
microcontroller and a DSP, each with its own memory. There is also flash
memory. The ucontroller runs an operating system that provides a driver-type
interface to the front panel, the MIDI connections, and so on.

You can write code to run on the ucontroller and/or the DSP, in C, C++ or
assembler (DSP only). Essentially, we have included all the components found
in a typical DSP-based synthesizer/effects processor, and provided some
software 'glue' to access this hardware - not unlike the audio system
interface on a regular computer. That's the commercial part; the synth-DIY
part is that we will give away the software development kit (which includes
plety of examples) and you can write your own applications on top of that.

So I suppose this is the digital equivalent of a synth case which has all
the outer components and i/o already wired up for you, and provides a space
for you to install your own signal processing. I recognise that this
precludes any DIY at the electronic component level, which is what many of
you enjoy, and that's why I'm not going to say too much about it on this
list. On the other hand, I saw that there was some interest in purely
digital synth projects, and in this area I feel the Chameleon is totally
DIY, and some of you may be interested. Incidentally there is a music-DSP
list for people who want to go deep into this field (which is pretty darn
deep).

My purpose is reading this list is mainly to learn more about different
ideas in synth design, from the signal processing point of view - obviously
many DSP programmers are interested in emulations of analog circuits. I
don't plan to do any promotion in here, other than mention the existence of
the product, and (if it is OK with the list) its availability to buy in
about 6-8 weeks.

Naturally I'm delighted to answer questions about it, but since they are
bound to be product specific I assume most of you will choose to ask them in
private mail or on the DSP list. If questions are asked on the list I'll
answer them there. I hope that is acceptable to everyone. I'm on about 10
synth-related mailing lists (as 'Anig Browl') and I don't like commercialism
either - I have my job because I'm a synth nerd, not a salesperson.

eddy

Eddy Robinson
Talking Head
Soundart: Highly Original Technologies
eddy at soundart-hot.com
Phone: (31) 20 4686435