Pleiad Maia home page
What is Pleiad Maia?
Pleiad Maia is a simple substractive MIDI synthesizer for ALSA and GTK+.
The name references the eldest of the seventh daughters of the titan Atlas and the sea-nymph Pleione. And it is nice, isnt't it?
The project was born to be the best sounding polyphonic synth possible to emulate the old analog synthesizers. This is accomplished by including digitally modelling filters and other common components found in them.
It is still a quite simple project but it is expected to be fully functional and usable by the end of 2011.
Current features
It has two oscillators with sync, an LFO, a resonant low pass filter with tracking, noise, ring modulation, glide and a few modulation options.
It supports alsa MIDI connections and ALSA audio.
Future developements
There are a few enhancements that could be done. Mainly, adding configurable parameters through MIDI CC and adding more modulation options. Also, saving presets would be nice too.
Other output and input interfaces (Jack Audio Connecting Kit) would make this more portable.
At the moment, there are no effects available but chorus, phaser and delay could be present in a future release.
Regarding the GTK interface, it is not clear yet if it will change to something more visual or it will reamain as a standar GTK look and feel interface. The main reason for not to change this is that a resizable interface makes it easier to run on tablets or other small-screened devices.
It is possible that in a distant future the project will include some other pleiads (i.e.: a percussion sampler, string machine and sequencer).
License and source code
It is distributed under GPL 3.0 and you can get the sources from here.