Yazz is a subtractive synth written in Rust. It comes with a simple terminal UI that allows all parameters to be edited by key sequences and/ or MIDI controllers.

The main focus of this project is on mouse-free editing: Yazz is a synth for terminal lovers.

This is still work in progress. The sound engine works, but some features are missing, and the parameter ranges are not perfectly balanced yet.

• 3 wavetable oscillators per voice, 32 voice polyphony
• Up to 7 instances per oscillator with frequency spreading
• Oscillator sync
• 2 independent filters with individual oscillator routing (parallel, serial, bypassed)
• Wavetable scanning
• User wavetable import
• Voice stereo spreading
• Up to 16 modulation assignments to almost all sound parameters
• 2 LFOs per voice plus 2 global LFOs
• 3 ADSR envelopes per voice, with adjustable slope
• Delay (mono or ping pong, BPM-synced)
• 36 sets of MIDI controller assignments

For a detailed description, have a look at the manual in the doc folder.

Yazz should run on both MacOS and Linux. Assuming you have the Rust toolchain installed, a simple cargo build --release should download all dependencies and compile the synth.

Make sure to build and run the release version, otherwise the audio engine might have performance problems (it's not optimized yet).

For Linux, the dev-package for ALSA needs to be installed (usually libasound2-dev or alsa-lib-devel, see https://github.com/RustAudio/cpal for more infos).

Yazz connects to MIDI port 0 per default. If you get a MIDI port error on startup, or if Yazz doesn't react to MIDI messages, try connecting to a different port with yazz -m 1.

Check the documentation for additional command line parameters.

• Chorus
• Multitap delay
• Additional key tuning tables for alternate tunings
• Additional oscillators (PM, FM)
• Editing via MIDI note commands

• Optional GUI
• Implement VST plugin interface