adding_synth.md

Adding a new synthesizer

To add a new synthesizer, follow these steps:

1. Make sure the synthesizer is supported by DawDreamer.

2. Add its path to the .env file, e.g., NEW_SYNTH_PATH=/path/to/new/synth/vst3.

3. Create a file under src/data/synths/ that defines the synthesizer as a tuple of SynthParameter instances.

   • Use src/data/synths/another_synth.py as a template.
   • Use src/utils/synth/get_synth_parameters.py to auto-generate parameter descriptions (then double-check).

4. Add additional arguments for each SynthParameter instance if desired (see src/utils/synth/synth_parameter.py and existing synthesizers for examples). These are used to constraint the sampling process used to generated synthetic presets.

5. Register the synth:

   • Add the python module for the new synthesizer to the package under src/data/synths/__init__.py.
   • Add the synthesizer name
     • to the list of supported synthesizer names in the PresetHelper class definition in src/utils/synth/preset_helper.py, and
     • in the SynthDataset class definition in src/data/datasets/synth_dataset.py.

6. Create a configuration file under ./configs/export/synth for the synthesizer specifying the parameters to exclude. The excluded parameters will be set to their default values during sampling and will not be fed to the preset encoder.

7. Once the datasets have been generated, files in the following configuration folders need to be added depending on the need (see existing synthesizers for examples).