Additive sinusoidal synthesis is a popular technique for applications like sound synthesis or very low bit rate parametric audio decoding. In this paper, different algorithms for the efficient synthesis of sinusoids on general purpose CPUs as found in today’s PCs are investigated. Fast algorithms for time domain synthesis of constant and linearly changing frequencies are presented and compared to frequency domain synthesis approaches. Execution time and accuracy (SNR) of the algorithms are reported for different CPU types. Finally, the algorithms are implemented in a fast MPEG-4 HILN parametric audio decoder in order to evaluate their performance in a real world application.