Bespoke Synth

A software modular synth that I've been building for myself since 2011, and now you can use it!

Nightly Build (updated every commit)

You can find the most recent builds for Mac/Windows/Linux at http://bespokesynth.com, or in the Releases section on GitHub.

Join the Bespoke Discord for support and to discuss with the community.

Documentation

• Official documentation
• Searchable, community-written documentation

Screenshot

Basic Overview/Tutorial Video

• https://youtu.be/SYBc8X2IxqM

Quick Reference

Features

• live-patchable environment, so you can build while the music is playing
• VST, VST3, LV2 hosting
• Python livecoding
• MIDI & OSC controller mapping
• Works on Windows, Mac, and Linux

License

GNU GPL v3

Releases

Sign up here to receive an email whenever I put out a new release: http://bespokesynth.substack.com/

Building

Building Bespoke from source is easy and fun! The basic cmake prescription gives you a completed executable which is ready to run on your system in many cases. If your system does not have cmake installed already you must do so.

git clone https://github.com/BespokeSynth/BespokeSynth   # replace this with your fork if you forked
cd BespokeSynth
git submodule update --init --recursive
cmake -Bignore/build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build ignore/build --parallel 4 --config Release

This will produce a release build in ignore/build/Source/BespokeSynth_artefacts.

There are a few useful options to the first cmake command which many folks choose to use.

• -DBESPOKE_VST2_SDK_LOCATION=/path/to/sdk will activate VST2 hosting support in your built copy of Bespoke if you have access to the VST SDK
• -DBESPOKE_ASIO_SDK_LOCATION=/path/to/sdk (windows only) will activate ASIO support on windows in your built copy of Bespoke if you have access to the ASIO SDK
• -DBESPOKE_SPACEMOUSE_SDK_LOCATION=/path/to/sdk (windows only) will activate SpaceMouse canvas navigation support on windows in your built copy of Bespoke if you have access to the SpaceMouse SDK
• -DBESPOKE_PYTHON_ROOT=/... will override the automatically detected python root. In some cases with M1 mac builds in homebrew this is useful.
• -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug will produce a build with debug information available
• -A x64 (windows only) will force visual studio to build for 64 bit architectures, in the event this is not your default
• -GXcode (mac only) will eject xcode project files rather than the default make files
• -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr (only used on Linux) will set the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX which guides both where your built bespoke looks for resources and also where it installs. After a build on Linux with this configured, you can do sudo cmake --install ignore/build and bespoke will install correctly into this directory. The cmake default is /usr/local.

The directory name ignore/build is arbitrary. Bespoke is set up to .gitignore everything in the ignore directory but you can use any directory name you want for a build or have multiple builds also.

To be able to build you will need a few things, depending on your OS

• All systems require an install of git
• On Windows:
  • Install Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition. When you install Visual Studio, make sure to include CLI tools and CMake, which are included in 'Optional CLI support' and 'Toolset for Desktop' install bundles
  • Python from python.org
  • Run all commands from the visual studio command shell which will be available after you install VS.
• On MacOS: install xcode; install xcode command line tools with xcode-select --install and install cmake with brew install cmake if you use homebrew or from cmake.org if not
• On Linux you probably already have everything (gcc, git, etc...), but you will need to install required packages. The full list we install on a fresh ubuntu 20 box are listed in the azure-pipelines.yml
  • Some distributions may have slightly different package names like for instance Debian bookworm: You need to replace alsa and alsa-tools with alsa-utils