Nyasynth is my recreation of the Meowsynth VST, updated to be compatible with modern DAWs!
You can get the VST at the URL linked above or from one of the download links below!! Simply unzip the .zip file and place the .vst file into whatever folder you normally install VSTs to. Nyasynth should be compatible with all DAWs.
Download for Apple (Universal)
(If your platform does not appear above, you can try building the plugin from source, or comment below and I'll see if I can try cross-compiling the plugin.)
I made Nyasynth as it seems that Meowsynth has been abandoned for at least a decade now. Since it's a 32-bit plugin, Meowsynth no longer runs in some DAWs, like Ableton. This saddened me, since I think the plugin is adorable and should be preserved so others can use it still, so I decided to remake the VST from scratch. In addition, Nyasynth has a few enhancements over the original, such as:
- Maybe better performance over the original
- Parameter names that actually make sense and are labeled correctly
- A somewhat higher resolution user interface
- More cats!!!! You can click the Meowsynth cat to get more cats!! They're my cats, Severian and Chrysi. I hope you like them :3
Boring Technical Writeup
I wrote Nyasynth using Rust and nih-plug, which turned out to be both a ton of effort and pretty enjoyable.
Why nih-plug? Well, the vst-rs crate appears to be depreciated (somewhat understandable, as it's a semi-unlicensed version of the VST2.4 spec, which is incredibly old at this point--so old that Steinberg apparently refuses to sell VST2.4 licenses anymore. nih-plug is meant to supersede vst-rs. I think it's actually pretty good? It's not locked to VST3 (you can export to CLAP as well, and also standalone binaries), and it's relatively "batteries included" (that is, it has stuff like parameter smoothing and state serialization built in, which is convenient since implementing that yourself is annoying)
It turns out that writing a plugin is pretty involved! Before Nyasynth, I had built ReViSiT, which was a classic 2xosc synth with a variety of modulation controls, so it wasn't too hard reducing it down to Meowsynth's 1xosc, one envelope, sawtooth-only sound generation, but ensuring nearly similar behavior to Meowsynth was actually pretty dang hard! Ensuring identical behavior with how meowsynth does portamento in it's monophonic and polyphonic modes was pretty trick, and I even took detailed measurements for how the filter envelope behaves with respect to the velocity to ensure that Nyasynth would behave roughly similar. Even a weird bug is emulated where, for some reason, the chorus mix knob lets you hear only the additional chorus voicing and not a 50/50 mix of the dry and wet signal.
A decent amount of time was spent just profiling and figuring out how to speed things up--which I was able to do so massively. Initially, the VST took about 20 seconds on my custom benchmark (read: rendering out Megalovania as a wav file), which I was able to incrementally improve all the way down to about 0.8s. That's a 25x speedup! In fact, I think I could get it down even lower if I reimplement the main loop as SIMD, but I'll do that in a future version of nyasynth. For now, I'm happy with it's performance (especially it's anti-aliasing--seriously, PolyBLEP is such an amazing anti-aliasing technique that adds basically zero overhead! I seriously did not expect it to perform so well for so cheap.
Making the UI was also a fun challenge--I deliberately styled it off of the original Meowsynth, hence all the brushed metal. I'd like to thank @porglezomp for helping me with making the cool metal texture and for @eash providing feedback on the alignment and spacing of the UI.
Some stuff I'd like to do in Version 2.0 of Nyasynth (or whatever other VSTs I make) is probably a more detailed analysis of it's performance--I'm guessing there's a lot of crazy SIMD trickerying I could be doing that I'm not currently, as well as seeing how optimized the floating point math could be (ex: converting as many divisions to multiplications as possible, as well as avoiding unpredictable branches if possible). Also, probably presets. Turns out I forgot Meowsynth had like 16 builtin presets and I'd like to mirror those (although tbh, they're not that good... like three of them are just "set the vibrato really high" and at least half of them is just the base preset, repeated over and over?
