Audio System

About instruments, devices, racks, Drones and the general architecture of the Audio/MIDI system

Synfire separates its user interface from the Audio Engine, which is running in the background and hosting all audio plug-ins. Both are separate processes that communicate with each other over the local area network. This allows for multiple engines to be run on different computers in your LAN.

Figure 1. Parts controlled by are orange and other parts are blue.
Tip: When a DAW is synchronized in order to run alongside Synfire, a third program comes into play. Therefore, in order to keep things simple, we recommend you begin without adding a DAW to the mix until you feel comfortable with the novel work flows of Synfire. In contrast to juggling the complexity of multiple programs at the same time, the Audio Engine is managed automatically in the background avoiding distraction while you work on your music.
Note: Audio output of Audio Engines is not currently sent back to and mixed in Synfire. If you run multiple engines on different computers in a LAN, audio output of each engine is sent to the audio interfaces of each computer individually.