Entries Tagged 'Audio' ↓

Finally after taking the time to integrate improvements, spectmorph-0.3.2 was released. The main feature is certainly the new unison effect. By adding up multiple detuned copies of the same sound, it produces the illusion of multiple instruments playing the same notes. Of course this is just a cheap approximation of what it would sound like if you really recorded multiple real instruments playing the same notes, but it at least makes the sound “seem” more fat than without the effect.

At the same time, the website was redesigned and improved. Besides the new look and feel, there is now also a piece of music called “Morphing Motion” which was made with the newest version of the SpectMorph VST plugin.

Visit www.spectmorph.org to get the new version or listen to the audio demos.

The new release BEAST-0.8.0 is now available at the beast website. As end-user, you’ll get exactly the same features as before, and might be wondering what changes were made and why. In this blog posting, I’ll try to explain why BEAST-0.8.0 is a lot better than any previous release, and why the improvements in the codebase will soon also speed up all development efforts. If you don’t want to know the technical details, just trust me on this one: I’ve been contributing to BEAST for more than 10 years now, and I’m more than happy that after BEAST-0.8.0, and possibly more infrastructure enhancements in the next minor releases, contributing will become easier, more fun and more productive.

When BEAST development originally started, the project was designed to use Gtk+ as toolkit, and the GObject typesystem as a way to do object oriented programming. This automatically resulted in the requirement that all BEAST code had to be written in C. So from the beginning, a huge codebase (> 200.000 lines of code) of C code were written. The only exception was a few scheme scripts, but compared to the rest of BEAST, a neglectable amount of work was done in Scheme.

I think for realtime audio processing and also GUI programming, C is mostly a waste of developer time (and also leads to less readable code), when compared to C++. But even after it became obvious that I argree on that issue with Tim Janik, the founder of BEAST, it was still a long way to make C++ programming fully acceptable in BEAST. It started with the plugins. BEAST plugins are relatively isolated chunks of code, that do not interact a lot with the rest of the codebase. So relatively early in the history of BEAST, we supported implementing plugins in C++. And if you compare a C++ BEAST plugin with the older C BEAST plugins, you’ll find the code is cleaner, shorter, and more readable.

However, a lot more code is in the GUI and in the BEAST core, or: plugins in C++ are good, but only are a fraction of the whole codebase. Still for all other code, the problem was that interfaces between components had to designed in C, because the majority of the code was written in C. Introducing C++ APIs in the core was acceptable, but only if a second C API was added. So for instance the new FLAC support for BEAST I’ve recently implemented is written in C++, but some of the code is just needed so that the other components in the BEAST core can use it; and these are written in C.

What changed with BEAST-0.8.0? Now the C code hasn’t magically disappeared, but we’re now using the C++ compiler to compile all of BEAST. So with this release the foundation was made for introducing C++ APIs into the core of BEAST, because now all code can use C++ APIs, because the whole core is compiled as C++.

To be more precise, another step was made at the same time. We’re using C++11 as the implementation language now. C++11 is the recently finished new C++ standard, that introduces many new features for the language, and although it is not yet currently fully implemented by g++, many parts already work and will make further development easier. So all in all, the process of getting rid of lots of lots of legacy C code and being able to develop new code in an elegant and efficient C++11 way is not complete. But BEAST-0.8.0 is probably still a lot more developer friendly than any previous release, and I hope that this process will continue in the next releases until the codebase is as C++ friendly as it should be. On the way, we’ll probably also be able to dump GObject based inheritance from the core, and add Python as scripting language; but I’ll blog about these things when they happen.

A new release of gst123, my commandline media player based on GStreamer is available. If you’re using 0.2.0 and see annoying warnings about option parsing on startup, you probably want to upgrade. There are no other user visible changes compared to 0.2.0.

SpectMorph is a project that analyzes instrument sounds so that they can be combined to create new sounds (morphing). It took me a while to get the morphing part implemented so that it sounds reasonable, but here is the result of more than half a year of development time: SpectMorph 0.2.0.

Now, how does it sound to play some chords with an instrument that slowly changes between a trumpet and a male singer?

Trumpet/Ah Example

The release, instruments, and many other examples (ogg/mp3/flac) are available under www.spectmorph.org

I’ve finally managed to make a new release of SpectMorph, a C++ based project for creating and morphing sound models from samples; it still doesn’t have the morphing part, but at least its fast now, too. Depending on the CPU used, 100 to 300 simultanaeous voices are realistic, which should be enough for almost any composition.

Since SpectMorph can now import SoundFont files, I used this to build many many sound examples to compare how the SpectMorph models sound, and how the SoundFont sounds. Ideally they would be identical. After listening to quite a few of these files, I’d say that the SpectMorph approach in principle works for a wide variety of sounds, BUT that the encoding algorithm will produce more or less audible artefacts for some sounds, which hopefully can be fixed by improving the encoder.

The SpectMorph Homepage has all the samples (flac, ogg and mp3), so I’m just going to link one example here, to give you an idea of how good SpectMorph and original can match: Bach on a Church Organ using SpectMorph and using the Original Samples

The editors at FamousWhy have conducted an interview about gst123, which has been published today on their site. So if you’re interested in gst123, this might be useful to read.