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 no introduction — then experiment with the random Instrument generator or Stage presets. 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 integrated C 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.
Standard Instruments and Sampler Instruments have been unified into a single pipeline for creation and editing. Standard Instruments (size 4096 period frames, traversed by frame-hopping) and Sampler Instruments (size 1024 chunks, traversed by grain-cycling/vocoding/chipmunking) now differ only in the extra Voice Effects available to Sampler Instruments at play time.
Instruments, Sequences, and Voices are now always available, with special-use screens docked in bottom tabs.
Better grain-cycling techniques, live vocoding with fewer artifacts, and mipmapped vocoding for the same quality of sound on low performance devices.
We've lifted our earlier prohibition on audio-rate mathematics in the engine and now support a wide range of real time effects and user-authored real time plugins. To help keep things safe on lower performance devices, effects with higher CPU costs are clearly documented, a diagnostics screen offers a live headroom readout, and a configurable ring buffer system helps players and integrators balance underrun risk against latency.
An intuitive delay control model with a collection of templates demonstrating how source/sink/wet/dry settings sound. With the exception of delay time modulation, we're yet to find a delay effect we can't build with this scheme.
A way for creators to cement their hardware design ideas before buying parts. A panel with as many buttons and sliders as you want, arranged how you want, processed through the Control Mapping flow exactly the same way a physical HID or MIDI controller would be.
Effects now support Modulators that can be customized with maximum granularity in an expressive format. Draw envelopes with a graph editor, enlist a recorded Sequence as a modulator, Gate Lock a sustained note and use your keyboard as a keytracked modulator — we even support chorded modulators.
Persist Instrument choices, Live Effects, Sequence placement, and everything else you might want to save inside of Stages, so you can move between a work in progress and a blank slate, or between several concurrently evolving projects.
We traded the much slower JS plugin framework for a more complete C-based approach. We ship compilers with the app and provide an editor with fully fleshed-out tutorial examples to help you build your own Effects.
In the spirit of helping people make audio hardware from stuff in their closet — most people don't have Raspberry Pis lying around, but nearly everyone has an old Android phone. Use a desktop over LAN to configure the Virtual HID, or use the built-in client swap feature to write your own JS screen that sends control signals to the engine. Use the peer control feature to send Instruments back and forth between separate Bisque instances running on multiple phones.
Choose the build that matches your use case.
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
sudo apt install libportaudio2 libportmidi0 libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0
sudo usermod -aG input $USER
./BisqueEngine
from the unzipped folder. On non-Debian distros, install the equivalent packages via your package manager (portaudio
, portmidi
, webkit2gtk
).
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.
A plugin bridge for DAW integration — most immediately useful for Ableton workflows. High effort but high priority.
There may be ways to create a better control mapping vocabulary or a more self-maintaining control mapping architecture by aligning the feature more closely to the existing REST interface.
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.
Bisque will be released under an MIT License. Use it free and without attribution.*
* Redistributions that include the stock Bisque client app's use of Sequence icons remain subject to CC BY 3.0 per creators listed at game-icons.net.