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Robin Schmidt’s Music Engineering Tools has released
Straightliner, a subtractive synth for Windows and the company's first commercial release. Here’s what Robin has to say about it…
Straightliner is a straight-lined subtractive synthesizer in a modern guise. You will find the well known
building blocks of classic analog synthesizers (4 oscillators, a filter, 2 envelope generators) patched together
in the traditional way. Now you are probably tempted to say ’boring!’ - however, the building blocks themselves
offer much more flexibility than commonly seen in subtractive (aka ’virtual analog’) synthesizers:
Instead of relying on a set of fixed waveforms, Straightliner’s oscillators support loading of arbitrary (single
cycle) audio files which may be even stereo. In turn, the whole signal path is laid out in stereo which
allows for wide and enveloping sounds even without application of any effects. The standard ADSR model
for envelopes is replaced by a flexible modulation generator which allows to define an arbitrary number of
breakpoints. The heart of subtractive synthesizers is the filter, of course. In this department, Straightliner
offers a multimode filter with 15 modes, among them a sophisticated Moog model. The user interface of the synth focuses on visual editors optimized for editing on screen with a mouse instead of the commonly
seen hardware oriented interfaces. These visual editors don’t just ’sketch’ the resulting curves but exactly
represent what is being generated in a ’what you see is what you get’ manner.
Key Features
- 4 alias free Oscillators, each of which may load a stereo or mono single cycle wave file (.wav or
.flac)
- Full stereo signal path for wide and enveloping sounds right from the start even without any
effects
- Multimode filter with 15 modes, among them a sophisticated Moog model
- 2 flexible modulation generators, with an arbitrary number of breakpoints and 9 options for the
shape in between any pair of breakpoints
- Support of microtuning via import of .tun files
- Hierarchical preset management to let you load and save presets not only for the synth as a
whole but also separately for each relevant building block to easily hybridize your patches
- Intuitive WYSIWYG user interface to let you comprehend patches at a glance - optimized for
use with screen and mouse rather than mimicking hardware.
Pricing and Availability:
89 Euro
More information and demo: