Bristol Audio 0.9.1 review

Bristol is an emulator for diverse existing synthesisers and organs

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Nick Copeland

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Bristol is an emulator for diverse existing synthesisers and organs. Currently, ten are implemented and a mixer is under development.

Bristol Audio software consists of an audio engine and an associated photo realistic graphical user interface called Brighton.

You may also want to chown/chmod bin/bristolengine to suid root, to allow it to use low latency scheduling. This will reduce audio underruns. You can also consider increasing bufsize and preload to reduce this effect, but this will lead to increased latency. Also, if you are using an SB Live! card with ALSA drivers you may need to configure a bufsize of 2048 (ie. 512 samples), which can be compensated for by reducing preload to 2 or 1.

Bristol will currently run 16 voices on a P-II 450, and this is the default voicecount. You can run any number of simultaneous synths - they all connect to the same engine, they will all run with the same polyphony since the MIDI voice structures allow for dynamic assignment of sounds to voices. You can run with split keyboard (no interface at the moment), layering of multiple synths on a single midi channel, etc. Some of the synths max out my P-II 450 CPU when there is a lot of MIDI activity, notably the DX and Explorer at 16 voices.

You can start different synths with different voicecounts, so you could have a 16 voice hammond, a monophonic minimoog, and a 5 voice prophet running at the same time - the GUI will negotiate the voice allocation requirements with the engine. The first synth you start will create the voice count. Subequent synths can have less than the initial value. If you start a monophonic synth first, you will only have one voice available at any time for all synths. If you layer synths you will reduce your polyphony since the engine will allocate multiple voices per keyed note.

Pressing the single letter 'q' in the GUI will send a quit signal and the app will exit gracefully(?). When the last synths quits the engine will also exit. If you press the single letter 'p' then libbrighton will dump a screenshot to /tmp/.xpm (in XPM format only).

There is a LOT of debugging sent to stdout. You may want to consider adding redirects to /dev/null in the bin/startBristol script to get rid of it. When the final rev-1 is uploaded most of this will be taken out.

What's New in This Release:
The graphics were cleaned up, some bugs were fixed, and work on a pair of Oberheim emulators was started.