mo0kid Wave is a new open-source emulation of the Waldorf Wave hybrid wavetable Synthesizer from 1993 for your DAW.
We’re in a synth emulator heyday. The Usual Suspects has recreated many classic digital synths as plugins. They are open-source but require the original ROM firmware to become a virtual instrument.
Besides Access Virus emulations, various vintage Waldorf synths are available as plugins. The latest comes not from TUS but from David John Whiting, developer of the MM/MD emulator with Maschine integration. mo0kid Wave is a new open-source emulation of the Waldorf Wave.
What Was The Waldorf Wave?
The Waldorf Wave was released in the early 1990s and was considered the most powerful and sophisticated Synthesizer the German developers had created up to that point.
It was a 16-voice (expanded to 48) hybrid wavetable Synthesizer with big-sounding digital oscillators with wavetable and resynthesis options, resonant analog filters, and complex sound-design possibilities.
mo0kid wave
Following the micro Q (vavra), Q (Goldfinger), and Xenia (Microwave II/XT), the new mo0kid Wave is already the fourth Waldorf emulator/emulation to appear in a short span of time.
Wave is a new emulation/emulator for the legendary Waldorf Wave, the flagship hybrid Synthesizer from 1993. For now, it’s a standalone application and a macOS plugin.
mo0kid describes it as an ongoing reverse-engineering and preservation project and a claim of a perfect, bit-exact emulation. The newly created parts are open source, while the required ROM is proprietary software owned by Waldorf.
The project is built in C++ using JUCE. It isn’t stated whether AI was used, but I assume so.
The open-source Wave plugin is a hybrid thing. It emulates much of the original hardware but also requires the original Waldorf firmware to work, as it uses an emulated 68000 CPU that executes the original main operating system. Plus, a second runtime executes the genuine WDV voice-board program
Their shared-memory communication, voice-update masks, semaphores, and hardware-register writes are reproduced and traced inside the model.
mo0kid wave tries to reproduce the original machine’s structure and behavior by modeling various elements of the hardware, including the oscillator system, filter, saturation, noise, and more.
Since the oscillator ASIC itself remains undocumented, it’s not a perfect recreation of the digital oscillators. Instead, it uses a behavioral model of the internal operation based on the Wave’s published architecture, firmware activity, and known hardware characteristics.
First Impression
Another very exciting open-source project from mo0kid. I’m curious to see how the project develops over time.
mo0kid wave is available now as a free open-source project on GitHub. It runs as a standalone and VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) only for now.
More information here: GitHub
Very CPU hungry, and when you save patches in Logic everything crash (Intel)
It’s an early alpha, and development is in progress. Not a finished release.
This has been fixed with the latest release https://github.com/mo0kid/wave/releases/tag/v0.1.6
On YT, the au tbh or told me that he did the architecture and UI himself.
Windows users:
Don’t get your hopes up. As exited as I was to give it a try, I was just as disappointed once I’ve spottet it is MAC only.
The dev doesn’t have a Windows system. As it’s open source, a dev can grab it and compile it for Windows.
I’m not getting anywhere with it. I found and downloaded the system and sounds zips from Waldorf site, unzipped them but, know what I am supposed to do with them? It’s asking me to mount a disk?
Anyway, thanks for this. The original was always one of my “Dream” synths back in the 90s.