New book on SynthEdit

I see Visual VST/i Programming: Synthedit is out now. I haven't sighted it yet, but it includes some of my custom SynthEdit modules, so it is quite fun for me. SynthEdit is a shareware application for PC that is a kind of modular synthesizer; it gained a lot of traction early because it had one killer feature in particular: you could save your creation as a VST and sell it or use it in other sequencer or studio applications. (Actually, it gained traction because it is fun.) I

SynthEdit comes out of New Zealand and has a public API, which has meant that there is quite a rich variety of custom modules, programmed with C++. SynthEdit modules are notoriously CPU hungry: a combination of a design preference that disliked zipper noise and the fact that it is quite easy to make big creations. The custom modules go a long way to help performance but still SynthEdit has a legacy problem that many modules are not compiled to use the SSE2 or SSE3 pipelining instructions of the recent generation of CPUs. So it is good to see that the book has a section on optimization: I see in the sample page of the link above that my 2 cents on optimization made it (which is to set your interface up to discourage long release times) so I suppose I must consider the authors very sound fellows!

From the look of the table of contents, Fortune, Schoffhauzer and Haupt (who are all active on the Synthedit group at Yahoo! Groups: most of the modules are sourced from participants there, it is a great community) have a useful book on their hands.

There has been a long (five years?) wait for the next version of SynthEdit. The developer puts an absolute priority on getting any problems with the current version fixed fast, and has worked on a couple of releases of the API first. Apparently the new version of the API will be available real soon now, but it is obviously a labour of love and pride, not of deadlines, which I find pretty admirable. What would be great would be some book on the API too, but that would have to wait for the new release, and perhaps be too specialized.