Larasynth

Larasynth stands for the Learning Auto-Registrant for Audio Synthesizers. Larasynth can learn to turn your synthesizer's knobs for you as you play.

Registrants are assistants to organists. For complicated organ pieces that require the organ's stops to be adjusted regularly during performance, the registrant adjusts the stops while the organist plays the keyboard and pedals.

Larasynth is like a registrant for musicians who play digital synthesizers controlled by MIDI controllers. Larasynth can be trained to adjust your synthesizer's continuous controller parameters as you play, allowing for expressive control of the synthesizer that you cannot achieve alone.

Requirements

Larasynth is a terminal application, so it requires basic experience with the Unix style command line and editing text files.

Larasynth is known to run on the following operating systems:

  • Linux with JACK
  • macOS 10.9 (Mavericks) or later

You also need:

  • A MIDI controller (such as a keyboard) that can communicate with your computer.
  • A synthesizer which can be controlled by MIDI. This can be a software synthesizer or a hardware synthesizer that can connect to your computer.
  • A MIDI sequencer or a digital audio workstation (DAW) in which you can edit MIDI tracks.

Installation

Larasynth can be installed with Homebrew on macOS. Linux users will need to build Larasynth from source.

macOS

Using Homebrew is the easiest way to install Larasynth and be able to update it in the future. If you prefer, you can also download pre-compiled macOS binaries here.

If you do not have Homebrew installed, install it now. It is a painless installation: https://brew.sh/

Now you can install Larasynth using brew:

$ brew tap sommern/homebrew-repo
$ brew install larasynth

From Source

You will need GCC and make installed to build Larasynth.

Download the latest source from here:

https://github.com/sommern/larasynth/releases

Extract from the tarball, build, and install (replace X.Y.Z with the version that you downloaded):

$ tar zxf larasynth-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
$ cd larasynth-X.Y.Z
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Using Larasynth

See the tutorial and the topics guide for details on using Larasynth.