Martin Peach wrote:
If you're doing something that relies on precise tuning you ought to make a good cv generator. I built my own MIDI to CV (and gate and trig, don't forget) converters that use a PIC16F628 and a 16bit DAC for 65536 levels on 0-10V for my analog synths, for less than $50 parts. You could also interface a serial DAC to an arduino.
and as i just discovered, you can order free samples with free next-day shipping from most of the manufacturers, making it much less than $50 parts. see for example http://sample.microchip.com/