BME Synthesizer

The is an emulation of an esoteric German synth known as the BME 700, very few in existence and using a unique dual filter design, one tracking the envelope and one resonating at a fixed frequency. The envelopes are also interesting, there are two A/R or A/S/R that can be mixed to create ADSR and other ingenious combinations.

The app has a step sequencer which can drive some riffs out of these unique oscillators and filters, it supports output recording including to Ringtones, pressure sensitive touch screens, X/Y accelerometer for pitch and mod wheel, multitouch and zooming interface facilities. The original was a monophonic instrument however the emulator can operate as a polyphonic (duophonic) synth via multitouch when it is enabled. The interface has options for fat-finger, analogue filters and rich oscillators however these will consume extra CPU cycles. The interface also has a full piano keyboard setting.

Interface zooming can be done either with the trackball (Nexus/HTC have them) or enable multitouch via the menu then tap the screen with two fingers at the same time - this will zoom the interface in/out. If you tap with two fingers but keep them held you can move the screen around. This kind of helps out with the dense graphics.

Patches are saved on the SD card along with factory sounds, there is an export and import option to exchange patches.

The emulator will, per default, attempt to run with a set of options that will give reasonable quality and the lowest possible latency/lag. The quality of the audio can be tuned with the menu options however the lowest possible latency for pretty much all Android devices is currently 42ms, on my HTC Desire it is 70ms. If you understand what this means then the value might seem quite high but the app is still a lot of fun.

Tested on HTC Desire/2.2, Emulator hires and lowres. The BME700 is one of a family of emulators.

Twitter @bristolaudio