Axxe Synthesizer

The is an emulation of the ARP Axxe synthesiser, single oscillator, noise, mixer, filter and envelope generator fully emulated in software with modulation. The app supports 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 Mini is one of a family of emulators. It always runs in landscape mode, this may be an issue for T-Mobile G1 devices. There are reported problems on Motorola devices, both the Galaxy S and the Galaxy tablet.

Test code can be downloaded from the following URL with a browser:

http://bristol.sf.net/files/Axxe-release.apk

When the download is complete then open the file from the download icon to install. The software will run for 'n' plays before requiring you to execute the license on the Android Market but you can test it for longer than 15 minutes.