Free, Open Source Music Synthesizer For Android

Developer Raph Levien let us know about Music Synthesizer For Android – a free and open source (Apache 2 license) software synth. It’s available now in the Google Play store.

Here’s what Levien has to say about Music Synthesizer For Android:

What you see is very much a work in progress. There’s experimental USB MIDI for devices that support it, and lots more code that’s in the source repository but not hooked up end-to-end, including a high quality sawtooth generator and the start of a sequencer.

The project might be of special interest to your readers for a couple more reasons. It implements “best practices” for low-latency audio out on Android, with excellent results on recent Nexus devices like 4 and 10 (and not all that bad on 7 either). This is the same work that was featured in the Google I/O presentation on High Performance Audio.

Also, the synth is open source under a license that encourages not only community collaboration but also being adapted into commercial software. To my knowledge, there haven’t been many synth engines that followed this path, so I’m eager to see what comes of it, especially as the engine becomes more polished and featureful.

If you’re an Android user, check it out and let us know what you think of Music Synthesizer For Android!

13 thoughts on “Free, Open Source Music Synthesizer For Android

    1. Come on everybody, downvote this comment as much as you can, this guy dared to say he finds interesting a synth made for Android!!

      The Holy Spirit of Steve Jobs got really angry!

    1. It might just be the video. I recorded the audio separately in Audacity, recorded the voiceover, and then sync’ed it up by hand (using mencode).

      The latency on Nexus 10 is very good but not perfect. In addition the audio out delay (which is quite low), there’s also the touch latency. Even so, I find it quite playable.

    2. It’s the real latency, tested on several hardware… It’s exactly the same issue on many other audio apps. Google doesn’t care at all about this good old topic… Isn’t it Raph ? 😉

      1. I’m only going to speak for Nexus hardware here – on all Nexus branded devices I’ve tested, latency ranges from not too bad (Nexus 7) to quite good (Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4 and Nexus 10). Many other device vendors haven’t caught up yet, because the FastMixer is an optional feature they don’t have to ship. Feel free to let your hardware vendor know it’s a feature you’ll consider when buying your next device.

    1. Yes, the feature is still experimental (there are cases where it will lose the connection when the app goes to sleep), but it should work, and I hope to refine it to the point where I consider it officially supported. Give it a try!

  1. I am amazed by this demo. EventOrBuilder can not be resolved to a type in EventComparator.java. This err is shown when building with eclipse because import com.levien.synthesizer.core.music.Music.EventOrBuilder is not found in EventComparator.java. Pl help me resolve it. Thanks for such

  2. The app doesn’t run on a ASUS TFT101 with Android 4.0.3 (it shuts down after a few seconds). Is this a known issue? Is there some log file to check the reason?

  3. Excellent App! On my Galaxy Tab 3, the interface is not quite as colorful as it appears here in this video, but the voices are great. Latency for practical purposes is not an issue on my device. Will development and experimentation continue with this synth app?

  4. I’m interested in the class SynthesizerThread, which I assume is the “heart” of the project. I downloaded from GitHub. As far as I can see, it is never with’ed by any other code. Is something missing from GitHub?

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