Naquada
is the greatest software synthesizer never written. I spent about a year working on it, off and on, but never really finished it to my satisfaction. I still have a lot of little but important things on the Naquada "to do" list, and a few huge things that I wish I would do but probably never will (e.g. completely rewrite the graphics engine to get rid of all the balkiness), and I really haven't worked on it at all in a long time (school intervened), so right now it's kind of a dead project, despite the fact that it is about 80% complete! I hope to resurrect it someday, since it is unquestionably my best programming, best graphics, and best idea to date.
Screenshot:
You can't easily tell in this dark screenshot, but the modules actually have a "body" that extends behind them, so they look like real physical units.
Sound files:
Smooth, sweet lowpass-filtery loop. Can I write filters or can I write filters? :-)
Little "song" with 3 Naquada synth-loops and an added-in drumbeat. (Not really a song. The melodies don't exactly go together :-P)
Graphics
Yes, I made all the graphics myself. Yes, I really am that good. I used 3D Studio Max to make the knobs and plugs, and I wrote my own software to collect all the "frames" of the knobs turning and combine them into one big file (the resulting animation is insanely smooth; it's a beautiful thing). I made the rest of the graphics with ArtGem (a Photoshop-type graphics program) and Microsoft Paint. I made the sockets, switches, buttons, etc. manually with these two programs, and I still managed to make them look pretty 3D, don'tcha think? The wires, "enclosure", and LED screen were all done with Windows graphics function calls in C code.
Audio Engine
The audio engine is ridiculously fast. This is a fully modular, fully reconfigurable synth, so one might expect it to be rather slow, loaded with pipeline-stalling conditionals. Not so! Naquada effectively recompiles its audio core every time a wire is plugged in or unplugged. Since wire rearranging is a rare, user-triggered event that doesn't normally occur while the synth is playing, this recompilation is not a performance issue. The audio core is actually a hunk of dynamically-allocated memory into which the recompilation functions hurl machine code. This reduces overhead enormously, since the recompiler can optimize register usage between modules, unroll loops, and so on. It also made the programming more fun, since I got to work with binary machine code in C. :-)
Plugin Standards
Naquada is a plugin for FruityLoops (FL Studio). That means it's a DLL that must be loaded by FruityLoops in order to run. Since not everyone has FruityLoops, I wanted to port Naquada to VSTi (the standard plugin interface for all major music production software), but I soon discovered that this was not easy, since VSTi does not support all of the features that Naquada needs in order to be useful. Nonetheless, I ported most of it to VSTi, and it now runs in a limited way on VST hosts. However, the VSTi port is NOT NEARLY finished. Actually it's still buggy and occasionally crashes (probably because I am stretching what few features VSTi does offer), and I haven't yet compensated for all the things that are missing due to the limitations of VSTi. So I wouldn't call the VSTi version "decent" just yet.
When will Naquada be released?
Good question. Maybe never. We'll see. Naquada is just a personal project I was working on for fun, so I won't resume working on it unless I happen to feel like it. Which I very well might someday, since it's so darn cool. :-)