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Thanks for your enthusiasm about the Sylphyo! To quickly answer your question: you'll be able to play a good and rich sound that evokes the flute in some aspects, but don't expect a realistic recreation of the acoustic instrument. I'll try to explain why.

It is extremely difficult to realistically re-create the sounds of acoustic wind instruments. It requires a profound understanding of the instruments, as well as very advanced digital signal processing and physics skills, and a ton of experience in the field of synthesis.
Our expertise is mainly in interfaces for musical expression, not in acoustic-sounding simulations. And as your experience with other wind synths shows, it's a job best left to experts, like our friends at SWAM and Samplemodeling, who took more than 10 years to achieve the best "acoustic" sounds available out there, and we encourage you to get their awesome products, and especially the Flutes. It's a blast to play them with the Sylphyo.

So the internal synth card we're developing won't have such realistic sounds, because very few people have the expertise to do them right, and if it's not as good as the SWAM sounds then people will be disappointed, like you were with the AE10.

However, there will be many sounds that respond like acoustic instruments and that'll be as lively. They will harness all the expressive potential of the Sylphyo, and we hope you will enjoy playing them, even though they don't sound like acoustic instruments.

We aim for a collection of vibrant and unique sounds that combine the richness and complexities of the acoustic world with the possibilities of the electronic world.
They will sound like nothing else, and they will sound good, not just because they'll use some new fancy synth techniques, but because they'll be tailored to the Sylphyo and its peculiarities.
It is now a widely accepted point of view in the research community that the relationship between the controller and the synthesizer (the mapping) is what makes the instrument what it is, and we intend to carefully design this relationship in all our sounds.
This is where our approach differs from others: we don't just add a synth to a controller, we turn the Sylphyo into many different wind instruments, and you might expect that both the synth and the controller will co-evolve in the future.

Our supplier says 250m if there's no obstacle between the Sylphyo and the receiver. I haven't gone much farther than 50m/75m myself, but it was fine.

It really depends on the Kontakt library you use. For instance, the Samplemodeling libraries (e.g., The Trumpet) automatically use the intensity of your breath (sent by the Sylphyo as MIDI CC11 messages, by default).

Some others are not programmed to use this information, but you can setup them to use it. The basic idea is to setup a mapping (using the MIDI mapping settings of Kontakt or your plugin host) that assigns MIDI CC11 to parameters like amplitude/volume/… I found a video tutorial that explains how to do it with any Kontakt library, and a forum post with some discussion about it. I hope it's enough to get you started.

Otherwise, if you don't want to do this, you can always set the Sylphyo velocity setting to Dynamic so that your breath controls how "percussive"/loud the beginning of notes are, with sample-based sounds. But if the sampler doesn't use CC11, you won't be able to continuously control the intensity of the sound using your breath, just note beginnings.

Don't hesitate to report your experience to us, this could help us add a Kontakt section in the user manual!

Hi Darryl,

Anything that responds to MIDI should work at least minimally (meaning, you will be able to issue notes, at the very least). The best synths and sound banks are those that can respond to MIDI Control Change 2 (Breath Control) or 11 (Expression), or even aftertouch messages: those will correctly respond to your breath.

If you want the simplest setup possible, our user guide provides some "quick start" advice with free/cheap synths for Mac, PC, and iOS. For instance, you can just plug the Sylphyo into a Mac, launch Garageband and play. But you won't get the best sound and it doesn't really reflect all the Sylphyo's expressive capabilities.

Now, we have our list of favorites, and what you'll like depends on what kind of sounds you'd like to play and how much money you're willing to spend.

For "realistic" wind instrument sounds, we are huge fans of Sample Modeling. Their VSTs allow to play many wind instruments (sax, trumpet, clarinet, flute…), even stringed instruments (check out the new Cello) using the Sylphyo. As it is a combination of sampling and physical modeling, the instruments are very expressive to play, and they're very light on memory. You can hear them in this video, for instance.
We also had successful experiences with SaxLab (there's a demo on their website).
One of our early adopters has also used Embertone Jubal Flute (check out his videos). We're aware of several other Kontakt instruments but we haven't given them a proper look yet.

For more electronic sounds, we like to use a Nord Modular G2 rack, but we haven't explored the virtual instrument space very thoroughly.
We're planning to investigate NI Massive and Logic Pro's new Alchemy synth, as well as the Moog Model 15 app another user has recommended.
One of our musician friends, Florian Becquigny, plays a lot of electronic music using the Sylphyo. If you're more interested in non-realistic sounds, maybe we can ask him to provide some advice on what he likes and uses most.

It'll depend on the synth you use and the mappings you can make. In many monophonic synths, breath control is often mapped to oscillator amplitude and/or filter frequency, so it's unlikely that a sustain pedal will have any effect… Maybe a polyphonic synth can be useful for this, if different voices are allocated to each note, but I don't really know. It could be fun to investigate the issue with a Max/Puredata patch or a nice synth platform like Falcon.

This isn't a Sylphyo-specific issue by the way, so have you tried looking for how EWI/WX players use a sustain pedal?

Videos are coming! Every week we work on new content! But we haven't mastered the Xpression yet, so we won't do a video about it if we can't demonstrate the awesome little features that work great with the Sylphyo! Of course you'll be able to test both if you come see us at Musikmesse.

Thanks for this quite complete report, Christian. Looks like you found a terrific setup! And you came up with a nice solution for the limited range of the Samplemodeling instruments. Reading your post made me look for my cheap Windows Bay Trail tablet and try out some SWAM instruments as well.

Of course, it's a 100€ 8-inch tablet (Dell Venue 8 Pro 3845, with 1G RAM), and Windows 10 is quite unreliable with it (I regret updating from 8.1), so I didn't expect it to be a trusty rig for live performance, but I found that it works surprisingly well for quick jams when loading only one VSTi.

First, I installed ASIO4ALL to be able to output low latency audio. Then, I downloaded the last 32-bit version of the SWAM Flutes and could install them without a hitch.

For the VST host, I didn't install Cantabile yet, but I had a copy of Hermann Seib's SAVIHost floating around (32-bit, VST2, with the embedded keyboard). It's a really bare-bones host with very few functions, but it does its job. So I copied savihost.exe to the same folder as the Alto Flute VSTi, renamed it SWAM Alto Flute 32bit.exe (the same name as the .dll) so that it would automatically open the VSTi at launch, and made a shortcut on my desktop. This way, I can just double-tap on the shortcut, and ten seconds later I can start jamming on the Sylphyo.

At first, I had some issues with some license dialogs on the SWAM interface that didn't manage touch input at all, so I used TouchMousePointer, an on-screen touchpad which is quite helpful when dealing with desktop and legacy software.
It was also helpful for precise pointing, so I could configure the virtual instrument with our recommended parameters without any problem. AFAIK SAVIHost doesn't allow to finely adjust MIDI input like you did, but a future Sylphyo update will allow to customize the ranges of CCs directly from the Sylphyo.

My tablet has only two ports : one micro-USB for charging and external devices, and one 3.5mm jack for audio output. Just enough for a battery-powered Sylphyo jam. So I connected the Sylphyo receiver device on the USB port using a micro USB OTG adapter.

In SAVIHost I went to the Devices > MIDI… menu, and selected Panda-Audio midiBeam as Input Port 1. Then, I went to Devices > Audio…, and I selected No Wave as Input Port, and ASIO: ASIO4ALL v2 as Output Port. After an intense parameter tweaking session, I settled on 44100 as the Sample Rate, and on 64 samples as the Buffer size.

To make it work without glitches, I also had to go to the ASIO4ALL control panel (in SAVIHost, there's a Devices > Asio Control Panel… menu), and change some parameters in Advanced options (the wrench icon):

• set the ASIO Buffer Size to 64 samples
• in the WDM Device List, select Intel SST Audio Wave for IHF, enable Out: 2x 48KHz, 16Bits and disable In: 2x 48KHz, 16 Bits
• in the Latency compensation section, set both In and Out to 0 samples
• and in the Options section, enable Allow Pull Mode, Always Resample, and Force WDM Driver to 16 Bit, and set Buffer Offset to 20 ms

With these settings, I could play without perceivable latency (there's slightly less when the output jack is used compared to the internal speakers).
SAVIHost shows my CPU is around 23% at rest, and around 75% when playing. I sometimes encounter brief buffer underruns (there are small audio glitches), but they should be entirely gone with a ≥128-sample buffer.

Having all the power of Samplemodeling instruments in such a small package is quite exciting! Here is a picture of my cheap mobile setup, and here is how it sounds. Again, for serious live performance I'd rather buy a powerful and reliable tablet like you did, but it's nice to know that even cheap tablets can run a Samplemodeling instrument.
The only issue I found with this setup is that there are much more glitches when the display is put to sleep, so I may have to create a custom "Sylphyo" power profile so that it never sleeps.

As for synth VSTs running on Windows, I rarely reach out for synths outside Live or other DAWs, so I couldn't say.

The lightning flash symbol means that the Sylphyo is connected to the mains and the battery is charging. You normally leave it for about 8 hours on charge (from nearly fully discharged), and you can play about 6 hours with a single charge. There are weird issues when the battery is depleted, as you experienced. As @Paul-Flute said, it's best to start over with fresh settings, so please do a factory reset.

@boriss Thanks. I too have trouble with the Morph; it isn't recognized at all on a Mac with OS X 10.6 for instance. But there seems to be some way to get it to run, as this thread on the Sensel forum shows. When I can get to it I'll run some tests on it (however I don't have any overlay).

We'd like to one day (and this would be the right time to introduce user fingerings and such), but currently, with a software development team of one, we have too many more urgent priorities, so it's not in our short/mid-term plans.

Great stuff! Thanks!

I'm the programmer. Once the arpeggiator is done and the current bugs are ironed out, we'll release a v1.0.
But don't get too hung up on version numbers, they're just numbers and don't mean much. What matters more is that you're satisfied with your Anyma as it is.

@andyhornblower:

• I'd like to support SysEx-based loading/saving/renaming of patches some day, for the reasons you describe.
• We don't plan to end support of old operating systems for now. In fact, I'm fiercely opposed to that due to the waste it generates, and I hope we'll be able to continue supporting old systems (Windows 7+, OS X 10.9+) as long as we realistically can.
• Any detailed info about your crashes/restarts are very welcome (descriptions, videos, specific circumstances, any reproducible steps if possible; send to support@aodyo.com and say they're for join). Our personal Anymas don't crash, and they can run for days without freezing in any way. If yours do, this is something we need to fix. As opposed to some other "reliable" bugs, these ones tend to be nasty because they don't appear reliably, every time you do a particular thing, so it's very difficult to observe them and find where they come from. Some aren't even software bugs, but hardware defects, which makes the problem even less trivial. Hence, the more data we get, the better the chance to catch them.

@neilcmanson What you've encountered isn't a bug, it's an unfortunate UX decision of mine that backfired :).
We "dim" the labels of the parameters that aren't used/mapped in the patch (except the selected one, so that you get a chance to know what you're manipulating), but the way we dim them make them look garbled. We'll try to find some other way to visually discriminate unused parameters that doesn't involve scaring our users ;).

But don't worry, nothing is broken or corrupted, that's just a visual effect.

@boriss Could you describe how your Morph is setup (are you using an overlay that's supposed to send MIDI?), and could you please try again with the "Slow Charge" setting enabled on the Morph side? Thanks.

@boriss @MiloDodds I'd really appreciate it if you could send pictures of the Diagnostics screen (Settings > Diagnostics at the bottom of the menu) at the "USB HOST" section, ideally the entire section, and report if there is a "RCVD" line that increases when you use the controller. This will help me increase the Anyma's compatibility with USB devices. Thanks.

The patch-specific internal arpeggiator (the Arp parameter of the matrix that's currently unused) is the only feature missing before we can release a v1.0 firmware. We have no release date to offer, but it's in the high priority list.