MusicRadar

You can create sounds by drawing in the Image Synth Room.

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• Review

For those who are familiar with MetaSynth, the name conjures up images of vast sonic playgrounds where sounds are rendered with brush and colour. The MetaSynth user does not turn knobs on a photographic reproduction of a venerable old synth, but instead 'paints' sound using brushes and tools that bridge the gap between art and audio.

The improvements in v5 are too numerous to cover here, so check out the demo on the website, which includes full documentation and a complete 'what's new' list.

The action takes place in any of six 'rooms', each of which is devoted to a specific type of audio design or manipulation. Each room is depicted in the lower half of the GUI, with the upper portion always showing the Sample Editor. Anything created in the rooms can be rendered to the Sample Editor, and thus made available to other rooms for further tinkering.

In detail

Much of your time will likely be spent in the Image Synth Room, which is best described as a super-high resolution piano roll – each vertical pixel on the canvas represents an oscillator of a different pitch, with the brightness determining volume.

The tuning map (ie, key and scale) can be selected from a menu, and you can define your own such maps. The default oscillator is a sine wave, but you can use any of MetaSynth's instruments as a source (see boxout for more).

You might already know that photos can be imported into the Image Synth Room. And by painting with the various drawing tools (eg, line, circle, curve, smudge, etc) you can create original sounds, eg, a fast downward sweep could give a kick drum noise.

"Much of your time will likely be spent in the Image Synth Room, which is best described as a super-high resolution piano roll."

With a little effort, complete soundscapes, phrases and rhythms can be crafted, and rendered out for use in any sampler, including MetaSynth's own built-in Sampler and MultiSampler instruments.

Notable Image Synth improvements are that the Fit To Scale command provides a bunch of new scales, and there are new drawing tools designed specifically for filters and percussion.

The Image Filter works almost exactly like the Image Synth and shares pretty much all of its improvements. Here, the image is instead used to filter a sound (eg, paint only across the top of the canvas and you'll hear only treble sounds).

The Effects Room offers 25 effects for your processing pleasure, ranging from simple volume, pan and pitch tweaks to more exciting options like Waveshaper, Reverb, Resonator, Harmonics, Inertia, Stretch, and more – certain parameters can also be modulated via a freely drawable envelope curve.

Additions for v5 include a Convolution parameter for the Crossfade effect and a Render To Disk command that allows you to overcome v4's six-minute file length limit by writing straight to a file.