[linux-audio-user] Acid for Linux ? - Pitch shift

[Darren Landrum]

One thing I feel like I should point out is that the main benefit of 
Acid is not necessarily the ease of use of the program, although that 
is a big part. But the fact is, the ease of use would not be any good 
if you didn't have a good loop library to use with it.

It was pointed out before that Acid lets you make songs in as little as 
10 minutes, if you know what you're aiming for, and you have the loop 
library for it. I think that last point deserves some reflection.

When you buy Acid, you're also buying a decent loop library. Then, when 
you want more, for $30-$50 each, you can buy an enormous number of loop 
libraries featuring some famous and very highly-regarded musicians. I 
seem to recall Bill Bruford doing a set of drum loops and fills for 
them.

So, if you want an Acid clone on Linux, an important thing to consider 
is compatibility with the existing and rather vast Acid library. Now, 
if the Acid loop discs deliver their loops in a standard audio format, 
all is well, but what if it turns out to have proprietary elements? I 
honestly don't know. I would assume they use a standard format.

This also brings up the idea of the Open Loop Library. Members of the 
community can contribute all sorts of loops and one-shots to the 
library for people to use, free for the download (and possibly 
attribution). Then users of our nifty Acid clone (which I'll call 
Alkali for grins) will have a resource for that fateful day when Sonic 
Foundry complains about people misusing their loops.

I am not much of a coder (I'm a decent Perl and PHP hacker), but I 
wouldn't mind doing what I can to help bring Alkali into existence, 
even if it is creating the Open Loop Library, a task I would be much 
better suited to.

Any thoughts? Am I completely off base? Thanks for reading this far. :)

-Darren

On Tuesday, December 10, 2002, at 02:31 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:

> Paul,
>    In the situation I was describing, (NOT ADVOCATING!) I would have a 
> track
> of audio in a tool that looked like an Ardour or Rosegarden audio 
> track.
> This track would have a wave file that repeats at some regular or 
> irregular
> interval thus making up part of a song. Assume that the audio is a bass
> line, recorded in Emaj. It plays at time 0, time 10, time 20, thus 
> making up
> the song.
>
>    The ladspa plugin is applied to this track.
>
>    At time 30 it turns out we want the same bass pattern, but this time
> played in Amaj.
>
>    The concept would be that the ladspa plugin (which we now know 
> exists
> already as per Jesse's recent email) receives a message at time 30 
> that says
> 'scale up by a major 4th' and then at time 40 that says 'unscale the 
> sample'
> or whatever.
>
>    Now you hear 3 riffs of the original, followed by one riff scaled 
> up.
>
>    To do this, you need the equivalent of some sort of automation 
> language
> at the track level so that you can say what you want scaled and when. 
> Each
> track has to be able to handle this on it's own, since these changes 
> will
> not all happen at the same time, or the same amount, per track.
>
>    I agree that it would be possible to leave freqtweak external, and 
> hook
> the track up using qjc or something, but if I'm running 50 tracks 
> where I'm
> doing this I think that's too much work.
>
>    I think that an 'Acid for Linux' type app might just want to have 
> this
> frequency scaling feature built into every track as it is pretty 
> common to
> use it in a tool like Acid.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark