Helm – a free polyphonic synth with lots of modulation | Hacker News Reader

Helm – a free polyphonic synth with lots of modulation

github.com

88 pointsPleaseHelpMe19 comments

I've been using this for a while (and occasionally post a preset on Patreon). This synth has some of the easiest to use built-in automation I've seen.

It also works on linux! Which is typically slim pickins' for plugins.

This is the third project that I've known with this name. The other two are an emacs incremental completion plugin:

https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm/

and a haskell functionally reactive game engine:

http://helm-engine.org/

Not to mention k8s package manager:

https://github.com/kubernetes/helm

To be totally fair, this came out before k8s's helm: https://github.com/kubernetes/helm/releases/tag/v1.0

Would be awesome I could easily send it patches and MIDI messages from the browser via websockets to offload some of the heavier synth generation that the Web Audio API can't handle.

+1 for supporting Linux

open source synths are always welcome! Great job

They sure are! Another great open source synth that is currently tearing up a storm in the music-making world is VCV Rack:

https://vcvrack.com

This app allows one to create - quite reliably - a modular synth system of your dreams, with many emulations of existing hardware modules being produced by the designers of those modules, themselves!

And .. there are more modules released every day. So many modules its hard to keep track of, actually.

So, if you're a synth nerd, get a look at VCV Rack .. seriously with this and Helm, not really much point in running other soft synths, at this point! :)

This might be juvenile, but is it only in British English that this name is funny ?

I guess, much like GIMP the name will stick.

I'm guess I will have to look up the alternative definition, but to me, a helm is the facility full of the controls from which you drive a ship

Yep don’t get it either and British English is my native tongue. Maybe mistook for the phallic implication of “helmet”?

Have you ever heard of Kubernetes, a tool that is so much in the upswing that it dominated the last Amazon announcements, that Docker decided to integrate with it despite being its competitor in some regards, that hundreds of thousands of engineers suffer to use for some time now because our bosses heard it would be a cool thing at some conference (and bosses don't really care if such a software is finished or not)?

If so, you might want to reconsider the name of your tool/framework/whatever, because the name Helm is basically taken in many engineers' head.

This may surprise you, but DevOps engineers are probably not the primary intended audience of this project.

And another pretty big, and probably different, audience: https://emacs-helm.github.io/helm/

I thought it's a fuzzy matching plugin in Emacs.

I've never heard of this Helm. Meanwhile, Helm the synth has been around for a couple of years and seems to do fine among its intended audience (which I'm in). There's a reason trademarks tend to be constrained to specific markets.

First commit for Helm: early November 2015. First commit for the synth: Mid-August 2013. First commit for the Emacs plugin: Mid-July 2007.

If any of them should change, it's the ones that came after. But they aren't even remotely the same kind of software, so I don't see that it matters much. There isn't much room for confusion.

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