The Aodyo team is proud to introduce this new forum! Welcome!
We created this place to enable discussions around the Sylphyo.

We'd like this forum to be a helpful and friendly place where you can introduce yourself to the community, ask anything about the Sylphyo, showcase your last creations, or discuss potential issues. The Aodyo team regularly takes part in discussions and is committed to providing users with support when needed.

However, if you encounter a malfunction or any other issue with your Aodyo product, you may want to contact us directly (support@aodyo.com), and we'll make sure you'll receive a quick answer.

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The Aodyo team

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.

@Wlodzislaw This update is compatible with all Sylphyos.

We had a chance to try the R1 recently. It is very nice to hold and the lights are neat. It is targeted at beginners and occasional players with very low expectations regarding performance and quality, and the sound set is aimed at the asian market.

To me, the NodeBB developers are clearly better at making claims than fulfilling them. I don't believe their moderation tools are unparalleled. Discourse looks like a much better engine overall.

We already do IP and some email pattern blocking. User moderation is more difficult than it sounds because these bots arrive in huge numbers and have become quite sophisticated. Often they sign up with just a name and an inconspicuous email (typical actual users of this forum also have weird emails, which makes the distinction more difficult), and they stay like this doing nothing for a random period of time, only to "reactivate" one day by sometimes putting a photo, a website, and then posting spam.

Anyway, yes, there remains a human element where we haven't put enough effort yet. The best thing would be to approve new topics, but it means we should organize to guarantee a maximum response time in order to avoid stifling new discussions.

@peter-ostry It's not that we don't care much about spam, it's that we're hit really hard by it, despite several (including paid) automated protections. We're currently pondering whether to transition to another forum engine to make this less of an issue.

@zelio This has always been possible under macOS. Most people with this issue are using Windows drivers that present this limitation.

In a future update we could maybe consider having a separate USB-MIDI device port dedicated to the editor (or if not possible at least let you dedicate an existing port to editor communication, which would prevent the port from being used for MIDI routing).
In the meantime you can leave the first USB-MIDI device port to the editor, and use the MIDI DIN ports for your DAW, as @frank suggested.

At this point, we do not plan to release a VST/AU version of the Anyma Phi.

Unless a new Sylphyo appears with 10x the processing power, it's unlikely that it's gonna be able to rival computer-based physical models of winds, so no offense taken :).

As for directions for the future, I guess it'll focus on the controller part (reliability, ease of switching between different configurations, more options) about as much as the sound part.

We do not plan to stop producing, developing and supporting the Sylphyo anytime soon, however new developments will arrive much more slowly than before the pandemics.

Our intention has always been to provide instruments that can evolve over time and continue to work independently of computer OS evolutions and even of our own existence as a company.
Since its introduction six years ago, we published 20 free firmware updates for the Sylphyo, much more than most competitors, and we intend to continue as long as possible.

But you guessed it right, a small team fighting amongst giants is not an easy adventure, even more so when you're doing niche products. And COVID and the semiconductor crisis didn't help.
We've been facing significant supply chain issues and cost increases, hence why the case disappeared temporarily, for instance. Even just making internal prototypes has become much harder and trickier due to this.
Delivering the Anyma Phi took us some time, and maintaining production of both the Anyma and the Sylphyo is a very time-consuming activity in itself.
Recently we've been busy preparing various trade shows (Synthfest, SuperBooth, NAMM) where you will find both the Sylphyo and the Anyma Phi (yes, not just at NAMM).

Even though we're growing in the face of all cosmopolite microbes and Suez canal obstructors, we're just not enough people yet to have a decent capacity of parallel processing, so we have to deal with things one after the other.
The result of all this, for the Sylphyo, is that v1.4.9beta is one year in the making despite being a relatively mundane update, and new developments will arrive slowly.
The best way to significantly speed things up is to get more people to know and buy our products, so we're very grateful for @Clint's work and we encourage anyone to spread the word about us.

I totally understand that some people find this an uncomfortable position to be in. If you depend on a product to make a living, you need it to be able to evolve at your own pace, and it can't be far behind your needs for too long before the situation becomes untenable.
I'm in that position myself regarding computers: I support small open-source hardware and software companies and buy their products, but I can't "wait for them to get their sh act together" because I've got work to do, so I do my work on computers from a behemoth company whose ethics I despise and end up using both. The behemoth doesn't care about my use cases, and the little ones care a lot but is slow to support them.
Either way I'm angry :), but I'm seeing more and more good things trickle down my way.

Now, what's left for the Sylphyo?

Major updates take time, and cooperating with others wouldn't make development shorter because it's often not a problem of not knowing how to do or finding solutions, but rather of finding the time to develop them and ensure they won't cause further issues down the line.
We've been carefully listening to all the feedback we received along the years, and this shapes our roadmap for future major updates. But there are many things that could be introduced much earlier in minor updates, simply because they're easier to do.
It's impossible to tell from outside if a feature request is trivial or not, only we can tell. For instance, the fingering changes Clint submitted were easy to do, but sometimes a seemingly insignificant fingering request could require major rework in some parts of the fingering system. Sometimes a blockage dissolves, and a bunch of requests change from hard-to-do to trivial, but we're not sure there's still interest in it.
That's why it's important to us to constantly get as much feedback and ideas as we can, and we encourage you to do so, keeping in mind that only time will tell which of these ideas will end up in an update and when.

I'll conclude this by giving maybe another perspective on the developments at Aodyo in the past few years. Yes, during this time our major focus was the Anyma Phi, but it would be an error to see the competition in Aodyo resources between the Anyma Phi and the Sylphyo as a zero-sum game. Many developments originating from the Sylphyo's firmware and synth culminated in the Anyma Phi we have today, which is much more than a few Mutable algorithms slapped together. The new knowledge we gained doing and perfecting the Anyma Phi will ultimately come back to benefit the Sylphyo in some form or another.

…if you live long enough to see it ;).
(just kidding, back to work)

Yup, that's about right!

Hi Thomas,

It wasn't practical explaining the whole thing in the release notes, but you can find them in the Fingerings section of the user guide. I've highlighted the changes in the picture below.