Developer Focus: Alexander Zolotov SunVox

Handheld PC News

Posted 10 months ago | News | Chris Tilley 7 comments

SunVox has is a fairly niche product that has existed since its original inception in 2008. The program is a music synthesiser that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and of course, Windows CE!

The program is a modular, patten-based sequence synthesiser which allows the user to compose music on the go. It supports multi-track, sampling, WAV export, effect and tone generation amongst a plethora of other advanced features that will appeal to composers - including support for connectivity to external synth units and keyboards. For those looking to have a play, the user interface offers a WYSIWYG layout with an on-screen piano-keyboard style interface for adding notes.

The Windows CE version of the app is free having been last updated to version 2.0e in March 2022. The development log also indicates that version 2.1 is currently in active development. CE support is currently limited to only ARM based devices, with assumed platform support for Windows CE 3.0 and higher.

While SunVox is freeware, the developer is seeking donations to help support his efforts, so if you like the program, please do consider donating.

With thanks to user null1024 for details on the app and website.

Find out more: SunVox

Posted on 06 June 2022 at 14:55By Chris Tilley (C:Amie)

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Comments on this article

dionysius 22 June 2022 8:09:22 AM

I managed to get the latest version working on my Jornada 728. Check the comments on the SunVox SCL page if you have trouble.

C:Amie 24 June 2022 8:24:36 AM

Thanks for the tip @Dionysius. How was the functionality for you?

dionysius 06 July 2022 1:54:31 AM

I'm still new to the program and to WinCE generally so I don't know how to get the most out of it but so far it seems all the basic functionality is there, though performance is not great.
The latency is too high for live play and any mod files I loaded in with 8 or more channels made it chug and I couldn't stop playback, so I had to soft reset the Jornada. I wonder if performance would be better on jLime or Devuan. It might be worth trying older versions on CE too.

C:Amie 06 July 2022 5:52:09 PM

I suspect that older CE versions would be worse, and probably not compatible architecturally anyway. CE 3 offered significant improvements in multitasking and scheduling.

Keep us appraised though if you make any progress. I wonder if its RAM is the CPU causing the issues? The 64MB or 128 MB chip upgrade would be an interesting experiment with it.

dionysius 09 July 2022 2:01:26 AM

I meant trying older versions of Sunvox on the same version of CE. I doubt CE performance has been a priority for the developer in newer releases.

I have read that the 728 has some weird display quirks compared to the 720 (like some applications such as Doom needing to be run with the -fixvid switch) so I wonder if it could be related to that as well. I do plan to do the RAM upgrade eventually. I'll try to benchmark Sunvox performance before and after when I do.

I'll try a couple more things and look through the Sunvox forums and documentation. I might start a forum thread here later.

C:Amie 15 July 2022 3:00:40 PM

Look forward to it

torch 20 November 2022 5:09:19 AM

I've been working on adding older versions of SunVox for the SCL. Also added dionysius' helpful install instruction! Thank you

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