CetoneSynthLight

April 8, 2026 · View on GitHub

CetoneSynthLight is a light-weight polyphonic synthesizer by Neotec Software. It aims to give you a light but professional synthesizer experience. Originally written by René Jeschke.

Sadly, Cetone Synth series had been discontinued for more than 12 years (since 2012), and it only supported VST 2.4. Original project is here.

But now, I (AnClark) brings it to life again, by re-implementing those plugins to DISTRHO Plugin Framework. It now runs well on most modern platforms.

Originally, CetoneSynthLight was a monophonic synth, but I have added polyphony support to it. So now it is a 16-voice polyphonic synthesizer.

Screenshot of CetoneSynthLight

Features

  • 3 oscillators with 5 waveforms
    • Basic waveforms: Sine, Saw, Triangle, Square (pulse)
    • Commodore 64 (C64) flavored noise generator (switch waveform to "Noise")
  • Analog-modelled filter
    • Support 7 classic filter models: Moog, Moog2, Dirty, Ch12db, x0x, 8580, Bi12db
    • Switchable filter mode
    • Resonance support
  • 4 modulation slots
    • Specify source and destination correspondingly
    • Tunable modulation amount and multiply factor
  • Full polyphony support
    • Up to 16 voices
    • Tunable polyphony voice count
    • Polyphony can be set to 1 for monophonic mode
  • 1 basic LFO
  • 2 AHDSR envelopes
    • Amplifier AHDSR
    • Modulation AHDSR
  • Glide (portamento) support
  • Simple arpeggiator
    • Supports polyphonic arpeggiation (optional)
  • Cross-platform
    • Supports: Windows, macOS, Linux
  • Multi-format
    • Provides: VST 2.4, VST3, LV2, CLAP, Standalone (JACK only)
  • Preset manager
    • Save and load presets in JSON format
    • Preset manager menu with bank and program support

How To Build

0. Prerequisites

You need to install GCC, CMake, GNU Make and Ninja on your platform. Ninja is highly recommended for its high performance.

On Linux

# Ubuntu
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gcc cmake make ninja

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -Syu
sudo pacman -S gcc cmake make ninja

On Windows

You need to install Msys2 to build Cetone Synth series. Download and install it from https://msys2.org.

After installation, run MSYS2 UCRT64 Shell from desktop (or Start Menu), then execute these commands:

pacman -Syu
pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-cmake mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-ninja
pacman -S make

You can also install Git in Msys2, if you need:

pacman -S git

Every command below should be executed in MSYS2 UCRT64 Shell.

1. Clone source tree

# Source tree has 1 submodule: DPF. So you need to add --recursive
git clone https://github.com/AnClark/CetoneSynthLight.git cetonesynthlight --recursive

# If you forget --recursive, run this
cd cetonesynthlight
git submodule update --init --recursive

2. Build

Cetone series now use CMake as build system. All platforms share the same commands.

You can explicitly specify built type here. For best performance, Release build is recommended. Optionally you can also set build type to Debug.

cd cetonesynthlight
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build

Built plug-ins reside in build/bin. Copy plugins to your DAW's search paths.

License

  • René's original repo is provided 'as is' and license free for public use.
  • This repository is licensed under GNU GPLv3.

Credits