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Surge XT is an open source virtual synthesizer originally released as “Surge” by creator Claes Johanson. In September 2018, Claes decided to release Surge into open source, and it is since maintained by a group of volunteers.

Surge 1.0 – 1.5.3
Surge was commercially released at the price of $180 in October 2005, by Claes Johanson's company named Vember Audio. At the time of release, it was already considered a feature-rich virtual synthesizer, with over 1000 factory patches, powerful oscillator design and flexible modulation.

Throughout the years, Surge has received multiple updates, adding new features such as an updated user interface, new oscillator types, filters, effects, and more.

However, the last commercially distributed version of Surge was released in September 2009, as it did not see any new stable releases from that point until being open sourced.

In September of 2018, as Claes became involved in the development of Bitwig Studio and did not have time to maintain Surge, he decided to give an unfinished version of Surge 1.6 a new life as an open source project.

Since then, a team of volunteers called the Surge Synth Team has continued the maintenance and development of this project.

Surge 1.6 – 1.9
After being open sourced, Surge has again started to see somewhat regular releases with new features and improvements. Notable examples are Linux support, a skinning engine (as well as a new dark skin), new and modernized filter models, a multi-segment envelope generator (MSEG), fully fledged Scala/KBM microtonal support, MPE, a large number of new effects, and more.

Surge XT 1.0 – present
Surge XT 1.0 was released on January 18, 2022, a little more than years after being open sourced. Surge XT marks a fundamental architectural break with prior versions (up to 1.9), as the synth has been ported from VSTGUI to the JUCE framework and as the plugin ID changed.

Since Surge XT 1.0, new features have continued to be added, such as a modulation list overview, a new Formula modulator type, numerous accessibility improvements, CLAP support, undo/redo support, the addition of an oscilloscope, OSC support, new effects, and more.

Synthesis method
Surge XT's synthesis method is generally described as Subtractive hybrid. Its voice signal path is mainly comprised of oscillators, a mixer, filters and multiple amplifying stages. Although those elements in Surge are common archetypes found in typical subtractive synthesizers, others are not. Such examples include oscillator-contained and inter-oscillator FM, Wavetable, Additive and Karplus-Strong oscillator algorithms, which are all included in Surge.

Windows

 * Minimum: Windows 7 and Intel or AMD processor featuring SSE2 instructions
 * Recommended: 64-bit Windows 7 or newer, 3 GHz quad-core processor featuring SSE2 instructions or better
 * Minimum of 4 GB of RAM
 * VST3 or CLAP compatible host application
 * x64-compatible CPU, OS and host is required to use the 64-bit version

macOS

 * Surge XT is an Intel/Apple Silicon universal binary. Intel Mac requires macOS 10.11 or later, Apple Silicon Mac will run Surge XT with any Apple Silicon version of macOS
 * Minimum of 4 GB of RAM
 * VST3, AU or CLAP compatible host application

Linux

 * PC or ARM system running a Linux distribution
 * x64-compatible CPU, OS and host is required to use the 64-bit version; for ARM processors you can build Surge XT for ARM on Raspberry Pi and similar (tested with RPi4/arm64)
 * Minimum of 4 GB of RAM
 * VST3, CLAP or LV2 compatible host application