I leave the notes below for those interested, but note that I plan on continuing any DSP-related development started here in my own RPN, stack-based language, dclang
: http://github.com/akjmicro/dclang
Fsyn is a Forth-based synthesis-package, developed using gforth and Linux. Originally inspired by the excellent package Sporth by Paul Batchelor, I wanted to see how far I could go writing something similar, but have the audio units written as much in possible in Forth and/or, have Forth itself available for making colon word definitions (the interpreter in Sporth doesn't have this feature).
Fsyn is still in very early development, so not usuable for much, but early results are showing that there is promise. Maybe if I get some Forth-savvy people to join this effort, it will go faster!
- Most audio units are written in Forth from the ground-up
- Stack-based/Postfix paradigm
- Small and fast
- Extensible with C (e.g. the PortMIDI module)
- Tentative plans may include ability to host LV2 plugins and script them
You will need to install a Forth interpreter. I highly recommend Gforth, as this is what I use to develop Fsyn with. Gforth has a nice C-interface, and this package will surely lean on that from time to time.
Several examples demonstrating features can be found in the examples folder of the repository. As this project is in early development phase, there will be more (and fuller examples) forthcoming (pun intended!).
Currently, the way to get audio out of Fsyn is to run an example and pipe through 'aplay'. Since the default setting is 32-bit audio at a sample rate of 48000, you'd do this, for example:
gforth-fast bells_of_doom.fs | aplay -f S32_LE -r 48000 -c 2