Chimers (v1)
· 2 min read
Chimers is a multi-featured Linux musical instrument and tool suite.
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Chimers (v1) has been succeeded by Fluidbox (Chimers v2).
It was originally named "Chimeras" due to its expansive and experimental multi-faceted feature set. However, during testing, the second voice engine had an unusual deadpan personality and tone, which resulted it in mispronouncing its name as "Chimers". The name has stuck ever since.
As an experimental tool, Chimers includes fully functional features in addition to highly temperamental features. However, in all cases, Chimers was designed and heavily optimized for weak hardware. This enables many novel features on almost all Linux devices generally regardless of the capability of their hardware.
Features:
- Integrated and interactive headless/screenless system via MIDI and voice interface
- Alternative remote command system
- 1m startup time on low powered hardware
- Supports the MIDI standard, enabling support of many MIDI controllers (up to 2 at once)
- Multiple synthesizers
- Pre-configured instrument channels and autoconnects MIDI instruments
- Pre-configures connections like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
- Several soundfonts where 100+ instruments (each with 88 sampled notes, including velocity and timbre variations) are all present in memory at any one time, allowing realtime playing and switching of instruments
- An exclusive MIB (Midi Instrument Bypass) system that allows performing any action (configurable and technically can support anything from changing volume to having Chimers perform web searches and read out the weather) including:
- Metronome
- Play 10+ backing tracks (configurable)
- Play random backing track
- Automatic instrument channel readouts
- Stop all playing music and notes
- Sound test
- Playback MIDI files
- Record and playback MIDI notes (these are not locked to the instrument so they can be played them with one instrument and later changed to a different instrument)
- 4 voice engines ranging from very basic to an AI voice model (all but the AI model are capable of running with good performance on weak hardware such as 1GB RAM)
- Read a text file like an audiobook
- Restart system
- Shutdown system