Sound Engine · bisquesoundengine.com
Bisque
A bisque is a finished product with an exposed surface, made to be creatively repurposed.
A bisque is a finished product with an exposed surface, made to be creatively repurposed.
First and foremost, Bisque is a soft synth that is fun to play as a soft synth.
For newcomers to synths and MIDI, you should be able to get started making sounds using your QWERTY keyboard with zero introduction — then kill time experimenting with the random instrument generator or voice sampler. For people interested in learning about sound engineering, all effects come with descriptions, and there's a wavetable viewer for visualizing how operations act under the hood.
For experienced audio engineers, the tree CAD instrument builder and JS plugin system should feel intuitive, and the voicing system is built to accommodate live performance flows.
But the piece that makes Bisque Bisque is its versatile API surface. Put it on the cheap SBC of your choice, wire up a game controller or Bluetooth keyboard for control mapping, and you have a prototype for your audio hardware concept. Use it to demo, iterate, and ship a new type of looper, sequencer, groovebox — whatever you want to invent.
Choose the build that matches your use case. All builds are unsigned at this stage — see the FAQ for platform-specific instructions.
This is probably what you want. For people who want to try the app on their desktop like a normal DAW or soft synth. The engine and the UI ship together as a single self-contained application.
Run the Bisque engine headlessly on any machine on your desk and connect to it over your own LAN. No provisioning needed — you handle networking. Linux arm64 is the real intended target here, but we provide other platforms for convenience during development.
For hardware creators doing a full production run. You've sourced 10+ SBCs, prepared your OS configuration (PortAudio, PortMidi, DAC setup, runtime linking), and need a provisioning flow for end users. Flash BisqueEngine and BisqueBooter onto the SBC; distribute BisqueBooterClient to your users.
BisqueEngine — goes on the SBC
BisqueBooter — goes on the SBC
BisqueBooterClient — distribute to your end users
Bisque is in active early development. Here's a list of improvements that are on our radar.
Inline sequence editing directly inside the sequence viewer, rather than having to record new takes.
Let users define their own LFOs and Envelopes and fold them in as first-class citizens alongside Effects and Transformations.
A plugin bridge for DAW integration — most immediately useful for Ableton workflows. High effort but high priority.
Enables audio-rate effects on higher-performance devices — opens up a meaningful range of new processing possibilities.
Reverse playback for Sampler instruments and delay buffers. Relatively low effort, requires unblocking in the medium term.
The current control mapping system works but has room to become significantly more expressive and ergonomic. Improving it would require inventing a new idea for how controls are mapped to actions so that they don't have to be enumerated explicitly. There's currently no good idea for how that would work. High effort with medium priority that may grow as the complexity of mapped actions increases.
Better techniques for instrumental Sampler instruments. High effort — contingent on available bandwidth.
Downloadable and shareable bundles of Effect plugins, Transformation plugins, TreeBuilder macros, and Instruments. The effort is substantial; likelihood depends on how much the community wants it.
Audio-rate effects are normally reserved for higher-performance hardware, but it may be possible to bring them to low-spec devices by performing the math offline using advance knowledge of the sequence. This would require a significant architectural shift — high effort, and contingent on there being real demand for it.
The tabling system enables unlimited oscillators and effects with no additional operations at the audio rate. But on very low-end devices, there are still enough table lookups and lerps to cause underruns under high stress. This item is about researching strategies for flattening Standard Instrument tables between MIDI down events and passing the instrument off to the audio thread in a more optimized state.
Bisque will be released under an MIT License. Use it free and without attribution.