[linux-audio-user] Python or Perl for daily audio scripts?

Christian Frisson theremin at free.fr
Tue Dec 21 09:52:27 EST 2004


Heyall,

About one year ago, I posted here about my intention to batch-slice the Musical
Instrument Samples from the University of Iowa
(http://theremin.music.uiowa.edu/MIS.html) in order to turn them into the first
free orchestral multisampled instruments library (it ain't so proud as it
seems). This has been quite a hard task for a newcomer like me, so I've decided
to divide this work in progressive steps: in order to become more confident with
scripting / programming, I first wrote a bash script to batch-uncompress another
set of multisampled instruments, available freely from the Hollow Sun Studios
(http://www.hollowsun.com/), and convert each map from Akai to rgc:audio's Sfz
format (waiting for the next LinuxSampler native format ,-). Sfz runs both
under Windows and Linux, by using either vstserver / vsti or fst / jack_fst,
and works, even if it isn't freesoftware (...)! This script has been
successfuly tested on my FC1 installation and on XP with Cygwin, even if the
latter solution won't work with a single operation (needs rebooting): Cygwin
still doesn't handle well RAM access (cannot fork...) and "for" loops aren't
that optimized for sure.

I'm not against giving a link to these early scripts, but I thought it was
better to wait for the next version.

As I'm a little picky on filenames aesthetics, my next step is to translate this
script into another language, in order to be able to parse HTML files to get
proper filenames included therein. I've been hesitating between Perl and Python
(as Frank Barknecht advised me before), because both are multi-platform and can
handle audio files, as required for the final project. Which one would best
suit? I've been programming easy student software in C/C++, if it can help.

Cheers,
Christian



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