I have also had an opportunity to touch Synclavier II once ages ago.
Concerning the Aurora-project, I started it in DebianLinux environment in year 2021. During passing years it came obvious that Linux's ALSA audio driver had too many hurdles and difficulties so I finally returned back to Microsoft Windows environment. Also Linux has too small user population in comparison to Windows.
The most important motivation to make AuroraSynSampler is to offer musicians an alternative to the insane DAW/VST culture in which few "system lords" (idea from Stargate's goaulds) compete from the users' money. Plethora of synthesizer keyboards are also manufactured in increasing rate and all of them are intentionally made incompatible to each other. New devices are published in decreasing support time and previous versions are just left to rotten into garbage without decent firmware updates.
Also nowadays there are very few decent sample sources available unless you have your own synthesizers and old samples. Earlier one could buy sample CD's containing good samples but today everything seem to be more or less junk. The number of sellers is indeed very vast but they offer quite unusable audio material.
Aurora-project does not compete with anyone or anything and it is a totally free musical instrument. I hope at least someone will benefit from its existance.
By the way, all files in Aurora (except .wav and audiopack binary files of course) are plain text (loop, voice, sound, keymap, wavetable, projects, settings) so they can be edited if needed. Of course editing must be done very carefully not to render lexical errors into them.
Pekka Upo,
Finland 18.03.2026
email: aurorasynsampler(at)polycsg.net