Munt MT32 emulator LV2 plugin

[witchspace]

I've converted the Munt MT-32 emulator into a LV2 plugin. Like the famous Roland D-50, the MT-32 makes use of Linear Arithmetic synthesis.

It is in usable state, however at the moment there is no GUI.

Source can be found here: https://github.com/laanwj/munt

Build and install instructions can be found in the top-level README.md.

Note: this requires the original, ancient, MT-32 ROMs to work, which cannot be distributed with the project due to license reasons (but can be found in various places).

[witchspace]

I was able to add a basic, but useful NTK based GUI It shows the current part status (similar to mt32emu_qt) and can be used to load syx files.


Status screen


Loading a syx file


SysEx LCD messages

[ssj71]

looks nice. The NTK code for the LCD is clever. Did you write that?

[witchspace]

looks nice. The NTK code for the LCD is clever. Did you write that?

Yep. I rewrote the LCD code for NTK/cairo, and introduced the fading effect.

[asbak]

Oh wow! I was about to go begging for this and here you've made a LV2 plugin!! Brilliant, thanks so much Witchspace. Now if only somebody made an open source D50 emulator

[witchspace]

Thanks, enjoy!

Now if only somebody made an open source D50 emulator

Yeah Munt does fix many of the flaws of the MT-32, such as the noisy audio path. So it's more similar to the D-50 than the MT-32 hardware was. The synthesis approach and even the SysEx format is analogous. What is primarily missing is the PCM sample ROM from the D-50 - which like the MT-32 contains attack transients, as well as drum samples, but a different set. Likely there are also a lot of small differences in interpretation of other parameters, but it is very hard to find detailed design specs about the D-50 online.