On Fri, Nov 02, 2001 at 01:50:08PM +0100, Oliver Kuederle wrote: > Hi everybody, > > would you please take a look at the following site: > > http://www.kuederle.com/rta/0_Analysis/Wishlist/index.html > > I'm serious with this. It would help me a lot if you commented on the > questions listed at the end of the document. Since I'm fairly new to > linux and audio, I'm especially interested in knowing if a framework > like this already exists.
Well, there are a couple of systems you could use *today* to do pretty much everything you're talking about, depending on how much and what kind of programming you want to do. OS: I'd go with linux because it's the most likely to meet several of your criteria: Everything is fully documented; reliable latencies < 3 ms can be obtained; the system is highly tunable so you could set it up to boot with exactly the services you need and get your software running quickly; and stability is good - onstage, a mature open-source OS is the least likely to crash or require a reboot. Software: There are a number of systems that could meet your criteria, with some (a lot of) work to create the patches you want. Look into: PD http://www.pure-data.org A MAX-like system that runs on linux or windows (poor latency on 'doze). Looks absolutely fascinating but I haven't had time to try it yet. Supports LADSPA plugins on Linux, and VST plugins on 'doze! I don't know how stable it is yet. (OT: Does anybody know of a site that has mp3 or other audio samples of work people have done with PD? A clip is worth a thousand words...) jMax ? from the same family as PD. others could comment on the differences between them. csound http://www.csounds.com Runs on many platforms. Weird, old, cranky soft-synthesis language and interpreter (for lack of a better word). It's quite fast and it can do damn near anything. There is an enormous body of existing instruments on the net, some of which are incredible. Comes with an enormous list of signal processing / generating "opcodes". Programming complex logic (e.g. do different things depending on the status of a midi switch) is possible but painful... ugh - GOTO statements! Pretty stable; it's been a long time since I've seen csound crash. There's even a way to create FLTK GUIs for instruments. sfront http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/ Compiles SAOL source code (which looks like kinder, gentler csound code) to C executables. In some ways a step ahead from csound, but there's fewer existing patches online. No GUI. aRts http://www.arts-project.org/ runs on Linux, no windows or mac. "The Analog Real-Time Synthesizer, or aRts, is a modular system for synthesizing sound and music on a digital computer. Using small building blocks called modules, the user can easily build complex audio processing tools. Modules typically provide functions such as sound waveform generators, filters, audio effects, mixing, and playback of digital audio in different file formats. ...The artsd sound server mixes audio from several sources in real time, allowing multiple sound applications to transparently share access to sound hardware." Note that AFAIKT, the synthesizer can get low latencies but the sound server cannot. Maybe others... Once we get JACK and/or LADMEA working (soon I hope?) and start porting apps to them, it'll be possible to concurrently run soft-synths, samplers, fx processors etc. that were originally designed as stand-alone apps. My favorite toys that I'm hoping to see this with currently are the whole SpiralSynth family. -- paul winkler home: http://www.slinkp.com music: http://www.reacharms.com calendars: http://www.calendargalaxy.com
