6 or 7 years ago, when I was in college, I remember using ReaSynth for actual songs. Back then I had barely any money (or time) to spend on my music hobby, so I had hardly had any gear or good plugins. I remember originally buying Reaper because of its unbeatable price and the fact that it ran so smoothly on my crappy Windows Vista laptop. Often when producing a song I just needed a simple square wave or saw wave. I didn't even know what aliasing was back then, I actually only learned about aliasing 2 or 3 years ago after writing some of my own synths and audio effects. If I had heard weird sounds coming from ReaSynth back then I would have likely assumed I was doing something wrong, and even if I suspected it was a bug I wouldn't have even known what to Google to investigate whether it was.
There are probably many teenagers/college students or even adults who are in the same boat I was in. They don't own any "real" synths and assume ReaSynth is fine for basic sounds and have no idea what aliasing is, and when high pitched notes start sounding weird if they notice at all they go looking in the EQ, the reverb, that weird free VST they found on the internet somewhere, possibly never realizing it's their synth that's creating the weird noises. And then imagine their surprise when changing sound cards (if doing so causes a sample rate change) makes it either go away or become worse!
Anyways, my point is that sometimes people (who are regular people and probably don't know much about DSP) use ReaSynth for real work and not just demoing the DAW or testing their midi input. Therefore I believe if it's included in REAPER it should produce quality sound even if it is a very simple synth.
Possible solutions to ReaSynth Aliasing:
- Make ReaSynth not alias.
- Put a little note at the top of ReaSynth that says "for testing purposes only" or something similar. If that's what ReaSynth is for I think that's perfectly valid.
- Remove ReaSynth from Reaper. There are plenty of free synths that can do what it does without the aliasing. And if they do alias it's not your problem.
You could even replace it with this awesome JS synth:
Hear me out: ReaSynth Aliasing
Linear Mode
