10 thoughts on “Arturia iMini & DXi FM Synthesizer On The iOS Update

  1. Although I haven’t even nearly exhausted the DXi yet, everytime I see update icon on the menu, I get excited and hope to see 6 operator update for it. But Audiobus is great too.

    And I would gladly buy another app, if Takashi Mizuhiki made completely new 6 operator FM synth for iOS.

  2. +1 for another Mizuhiki app, perhaps with a simple sequencer in it? would be rad. anyways, iMini and DXi are two of my favorite synths!

  3. I like DXi, but I have a sneaking suspicion that its audio engine is something like MAME’s YM2151 emulator code, which is open source and readily available to anyone but sadly only 4-op because it’s designed to emulate a specific low-cost FM chip that went into various arcade machines, video game consoles, and some MSX computers. I expect may be the reason that we many cheap or free 4-operator YM2151-style softsynths, while full-blown DX7-class 6-operator synths are rarer and more expensive – and completely absent on iOS as yet!

    So I would also love to have full 6-operator FM, but I wouldn’t expect it any time soon.

    Hopefully the developer will prove me wrong here! It’s a nice app, and he seems like a good guy and also responsive to user feedback. 😀

    1. Hmm, the internets claim that the YM2151/OPM chip is nearly identical to the YM2164/OPP used in the DX100.

      Anyway, DXi is what convinced me to get a TX81Z. ;-p

  4. Hey, that’s the M-audio KeyStation Mini isn’t it? It’s my favorite iPad keyboard ever since my LPK-25 died (before it died the LPK-25 was a much better keyboard but it has fewer keys obviously.)

  5. He’s right in a sense that “originally FM synthesis only used sine waves” since that was true on the DX7 and John Chowning et al. originally focused on sine waves – but 4-operator synths (DX100, TX81Z, etc.) usually supported other waveforms, perhaps to compensate somewhat for their lack of oscillators.

    And of course analog synths with cross-modulation supported all sorts of waveforms.

    1. Weren’t those extra waves not only modified versions of a sine wave like only playing the first half or reversing the second half of the wave stored in on-chip memory. I might be completely off here but from a technical and economical stand point that seems very plausible.

      1. I think there may be a method to Yamaha’s madness, and it probably goes beyond simply trying to get more waveforms out of the same table. Some of the waves are useful as carrier waves – e.g. waves that vaguely resemble square, pulse, and square-saw or have various sets of harmonics which you can try to use (or add together, e.g. even + odd harmonics) to get a certain instrument-like sound, and some may be useful as modulators and might help to get a smoother or more resonant filter-y effect.

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