[LAD] Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch

[Patrick Shirkey]

On Thu, September 30, 2010 3:47 am, Robin Gareus wrote:
> On 09/30/10 09:40, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, September 30, 2010 12:01 am, Louigi Verona wrote:
>>> Hey guys!
>>>
>>> I have two questions.
>>>
>>> 1. How does Sound Stretch work? It is incredible the way it can produce
>>> a
>>> tone which has no noticeable vibrations, just a wall of sound. How is
>>> that
>>> accomplished, in layman terms if possible :)
>>
>> It grabs a section of the audio and copies/multiplies it then appears to
>> apply some pretty neat math to smooth it all out funnily enough using a
>> selection of windows to get the best result.
>
> Are you sure? Where did you get that info from?
>
> Just skimming over Stretch.cpp gives me the impression that it's based
> on Fourier analysis and re-sythesis.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_analysis
>
> The process() loop looks like:
> {
>   apply_window();
>   smp2freq(); // Fourier Analysis
>   process_spectrum();
>   freq2smp(); // Fourier Synth
> }
>
> In layman terms:
>
> There's a smart French guy by the name of Joseph F. sitting inside it:
> If you play him some audio: He thinks: "Hey, this is actually just a few
> simple sine-waves added together (superpositioned)", he quickly
> calculates their frequencies and amplitudes and asks "Now, you want to
> change the duration?" easy: "I'll generate some new sine-waves with
> these frequencies and amplitudes, how long did you say you want?"
>
> (The smart thing about this French guy is that he actually speaks fluent
> English - Sorry I could not resist :)


I suppose you missed the various windows he has added. Maybe they are just
there for show?

>
>>
>>> 2. Can this program be jackified and is that a lot of work?
>>>
>>
>> It uses portaudio. Doesn't that have a jack output?
>
> Yes, but its implementation is not very well done.
>
>> Otherwise yes, he has designed it so that adding jack support would be
>> fairly trivial.
>>
>
> Indeed, to change the integrated player to output to JACK would be
> trivial. It currently uses the PortAudio's StreamCallback which is very
> similar to JACK's process callback.
>
> Using it to do "live" timestreching with JACK (jack-in -> jack-out) is
> AFAICT impossible because:
>
> <details>
> If you feed it N samples (or seconds) of audio you end up with M samples
> (or seconds) with  M > N.
>
> One could do a kludge:
> eg. for a 1:10 time stretch with continuous output:
>   - read 1 sec of audio from the input
>   - ignore 9 secs of the input
> but I don't think this will be useful.
> </details>
>

But nothing wrong with having it jackified for ease of use. Especially if
the portaudio code is as you suggest. No doubt someone will take the time
if it is a good piece of software otherwise.



-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.