

January 2008

15:09 Saturday 26 January 2008

wcnt development continues...

Development of my wcnt - Wav Composer Not Toilet is still underway. When I resumed developing wcnt around November last year, I had only planned to add a couple of new features, but instead its development has demanded full precedence of my creative faculties.

At the moment, I am mainly debugging it after re-implimenting one of the central data storage structures within the program as a C++ template class.

As my program is never going to be widely used, I am the main user, I am the only user of my program who gives feedback about the way it works and which features are missing. And as I really do use the program I feel I'm in quite a strong position to say that the new features coming up in the next release will really make it just that little bit more usefull and perhaps attract users to it. The latter of course could just be dellusion ;-)

Some of the new upcoming features:

snapshot_mode is a new parameter for the wavfile_out module which adds the date and time to the name of the audio file being created. This is a really useful feature as generated sounds need no longer be overwritten after you've made modifications to a .wc file.

fader is a new module which fades in and fades out a sound. Primarily intended for the generation of unsequenced sounds, it is far easier to use than an adsr for this purpose.

These next modules allow a basic form of polyphony (but don't confuse that with polyphonic sequencing which it is not).

trig_counter counts the number of times it's input is triggered and outputs the current count.

trig_router creates count wcnt_trigger modules and routes the input trigger to one of them at a time, depending on the value coming in through it's in_count input (for example from the trig_counter).

trig_echo works in a similiar fashion to the trig_counter but echos the input trigger.

group_control is a new module which controls when a group of modules are processed - ie if the output from the group is inaudible there is no need to process them.

There are other new features too, but I can't recall them at present.

14:45 Saturday 26 January 2008

Digital Artists Handbook

The Digital Artists Handbook(dead link) is a new website offering help and guidance to digital artists - and - encourages artists to use Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) - which is always A Good Thing.

01:11 Monday 7 January 2008

wcnt-1.26-pre Released!

Since near the end of November 2007 I have been programming my 'pet' project, wcnt. wcnt is a commandline not-real-time modular audio synth, sequencer, and sampler for the GNU/Linux based computer.

This is the second release building up to wcnt-1.26

Since wcnt-1.25.5, the program has undergone many important changes.

  * libsndfile: the audio file IO lib from allows wcnt
    to read and write *WAV* audio in other data formats besides 16bit
    pcm. Consequently, all 16bit 'audio' inputs and outputs have been
    removed. *** Make sure you have it installed *** :)

  * LADSPA: a number of modules (9) have been created to use a select
    few LADSPA plugins. These provide much better filters, reverb,
    limiting, and compression. More might be added in future.

  * orbit module: impliments three orbit fractals which iterate upon
    a trigger, and the output of which is scaled (via an iteration
    test) within the -1.0 to +1.0 range.

  * adsr_scaler data object: allows indivdual sections of previously
    defined adsr modules to be scaled on the time axis. it's quick
    and easy.

  * improved command line option handling: help describing the command
    line options. several new options such as --dont-run and --no-title.
    module help now lists the modules sorted into three alphabetical
    collumns to make life easier.

  * many memory leaks plugged, and numerous operational bugs squashed.

  * no more -ffast_math compiler optimizations causing dodgy calculations.

  * removed sine_wave and tri_wave modules altogether.

  * wave module: a new easy-to-use module for quickly generating sine,
    triangle, and sawtooth waveforms and a number of variations of these
    outputting in the 0.0 to +1.0 range (instead of -1.0 to +1.0).

  * wave_phase module: comes close to the old sine_wave and triangle_wave
    implimentations. seperate phase trigger and phase_step inputs, and
    seperate phase_step input for a shaping waveform. improved algorithm
    means it's more likely to do what it's meant to :). new parameter to
    invert every other phase (or every other partial phase etc), combined
    with shaping (ie multiplication of two waveforms) allows a greater
    variety of waveforms to be created.

  * dc_filter and rms modules: no longer do their calculations in such an
    extremely deffective manner.

  * deg_size type inputs and outputs renamed to the far more sensible
    phase_step type.

  * constant_freq and constant_note: two new constant modules which
    output translations of their parameter, so they're independant of
    the sample rate unlike doing the same thing with the constant module.

  * balance module: this is the modifier module renamed to show what it
    actually does: balance two signals.

  * modifier module: does something much more interesting than balance
    two signals - ie combining two waveforms to create a third.

  * many code changes and improvments.

01:07 Monday 7 January 2008

Various: Audio

The old website here has been a bit quiet lately...Sorry, I've been busy...

There's a number of audio MP3's I've uploaded into the /art/audio/(dead link) directory which I've not created pages for, yet.

Here's a list of them (in descending order by date):

porters_rubbish_run.mp3(dead link)*
trigger_happy2.3i.mp3(dead link)*
trigger_happy2.3-misc.mp3(dead link)*
trigger_happy2.2-rock_king_of_stone.mp3(dead link)
trigger_happy2.mp3(dead link)
nostalgia.mp3(dead link)**
just_one_minute_i_just_cant_stop.mp3(dead link)
price_crash.mp3(dead link)*

* = recommended ** = super-recommended.

The porters_rubbish_run.mp3 track was recorded on my new portable digital sound recorder, nice (still getting to grips with it). The others were created using my program (Wav Composer Not Toilet) as I tested and developed the latest version of it.



A page detailing new stuff and other random noise.




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