Hate to hijack what I am sure is a mind expanding discussion on software distribution, the law of karma, and modern celebrity. But I am curious about something and was hoping to get an opinion from some of the music production experts on here. Of which there appear to be legion. Which is awesome :)
How difficult is it to duplicate Serum-esque wavetable generation using ChucK or CSound? It seems in my uninformed opinion you would have a lot more freedom using raw math over visual gui. Do you have the same range of available osc's and filters as you have in commercial packages? Or would they be relatively easy to implement if missing out of the box?
>How difficult is it to duplicate Serum-esque wavetable generation using ChucK or CSound?
Serum-esque? Sure, selecting waveforms from a lookup table isn't difficult. However implementing clean sounding alias-free oscillators that can themselves be modulated at audio rate and so on requires years of accumulated domain knowledge. On top of that serum has all kinds of fancy features, such as the ability to import wave files and generate good-sounding wavetables from them, high quality filters, (look up zero-delay-feedback filters) complex modulation routing and most importantly, a GUI that lets you navigate all this complexity and actually compose music with it.
>you would have a lot more freedom using raw math over visual gui.
Exactly. Freedom is the enemy of creativity. Hence why the majority of max/msp users don't actually make music with it. The more layers of abstraction and choices there are standing between your musical idea and making actual sounds, the harder it is to ever realise those ideas. By the time you've finished messing around with all the technical stuff and making endless choices, you've lost the idea. Hence the endless appeal of the acoustic guitar and human voice combo.
It's certainly possible to make music the other way around, where you let the machines have the ideas and you simply guide them, but it's a very different thing. Using pure math and code really shines here, as well as modular synthesis equipment.
EDIT: talking of modular, Waldorf, the german company who pioneered wavetable synths in the 90s (you'll take my uWave XT from my cold dead hands!) have just released a wavetable-based eurorack module, and it's pretty extra-crunchy, no anti aliasing here ;)
@JonnieCache covers a lot of points about the oscillators. It's not just that Serum offers a wavetable lookup oscillator, but one that can scan through a wavetable in realtime, "Warp" the sound in various way (including FM, PWM, hard sync, stretching) without aliasing. Then there's also the tools to draw, mathematically generate or import your own wave files, and make wavetables blending between them (from simple crossfading to FFT blending, etc)
There's a ton of filters, I'm sure you could find the basic LP/BP/HP filters, but I know some of the moog-style filters have to be licensed. There's also filter options that aren't typically considered "filters" (flange, allpass with multiple stages, a weird reverb-esque one), and a few filters that are just Duda's own experiments (I think he said the French LP model was just him playing around with the math).
Then you'd also have to reimplement the FX section, which Serum also provides as a standalone plugin that you can place after other audio sources.
Still though, the GUI is a huge benefit of Serum, which makes editing waveforms, envelope curves, LFO shapes, and modulation routing really easy. Almost anything can be routed to almost anything else, as well as several macro controls, which makes it a great live instrument too.
How difficult is it to duplicate Serum-esque wavetable generation using ChucK or CSound? It seems in my uninformed opinion you would have a lot more freedom using raw math over visual gui. Do you have the same range of available osc's and filters as you have in commercial packages? Or would they be relatively easy to implement if missing out of the box?