Linux-audio-dev October 2010

linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org

54 participants
39 discussions

by Erik de Castro Lopo

Hi all, Latest libsndfile is now available here: http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/#Download Changes are: * Couple of fixes for SDS file writer. * Fixes arising from static analysis. * Handle FLAC files with ID3 meta data at start of file. * Handle FLAC files which report zero length. * Other minor bug fixes and improvements. Cheers, Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/

14 years, 5 months

[ANN] Qtractor 0.4.7 - The Furious Desertrix is out!

by Rui Nuno Capela

It's TYOQA (The Year Of Qtractor Automation:) what else? But wait, there's three months to go yet. Meanwhile, the foundations have already been laid and one can now tell that a rocky milestone is ready to get bumped. Ouch! Qtractor 0.4.7 (furious desertrix) is out! Release highlights: - MIDI learn/controller mapping for all plugin parameters (NEW) - Extended Clip fade-in/out WYSIWYG curves (NEW) - MIDI resolution overflow (FIX) - MIDI tempo standard base on quarter-note (FIX) - Extended MIDI controller mapping for mixer/tracks (NEW) - Audio metronome gain control (NEW) - Mute/solo tracks while looping (FIX) - MIDI Clock support (NEW) - Audio clip import while looping (FIX) - MIDI track bank-select/program-change transparency (FIX) - VeSTige headers included for native VST plugin support (NEW) - JACK transport sync support (FIX) - Clip tempo-adjust tool (NEW) - Audio tracks auto-monitoring (FIX) - Transport back/forward stops on loop points (NEW) - MIDI tracks redundant mute/solo (FIX) See also: http://www.rncbc.org/drupal/node/235 Website: http://qtractor.sourceforge.net Project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtractor Downloads: - source tarball: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.4.7.tar.gz - source package (openSUSE 11.3): http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.4.7-1.rncbc.suse113.sr… - binary packages (openSUSE 11.3): http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.4.7-1.rncbc.suse113.i5… http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.4.7-1.rncbc.suse113.x8… - user manual (nevermind outdated): http://downloads.sourceforge.net/qtractor/qtractor-0.3.0-user-manual.pdf Weblog (upstream support): http://www.rncbc.org License: Qtractor is free, open-source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later. Change-log: - While moving multi-selected MIDI events around the clip editor (aka piano-roll), with help of keyboard arrow keys, that is, was not clear which one was the so-called "anchor" event, the one which positioning gets honored for snap-to-beat business. Not anymore: the anchor event now defaults to the earliest in time or the one the user's last point(-click)ed. - MIDI control observer pattern implementation has sneaked in, making it ready for the so-called and long-awaited "MIDI Learn" feature and arbitrary MIDI controller assignment, for plugin parameters in particular. - MMC DEFERRED PLAY doesn't cause transport state to stop if currently rolling (mitigating bug #3067264). - Audio clip merge processing might have been skipping a few initial frame blocks, now fixed. - Clip selection and plugin parameter hash optimization. - Anti-glitch audio clip macro fade-in/out fixed again. - New clip fade-in/out slopes (curves) are introduced, partially adapted and refactored from those easing equations of Robert Penner's fame. - Clip fade-in/out non-linear slopes are now shown as actual WYSIWYG curves. - Escape key now closes generic plugin widgets as ever found usual elsewhere. - Picking nits: unselect current track when clicking on any gray empty area, also accessible from a new menu item: Track/Navigate/None. - A nasty and deadly MIDI resolution overflow has been finally fixed, allowing for long MIDI sequences (1h+) to load correctly on 32bit machines from now on (was perfectly fine on 64bit though). - MIDI editor selection hash optimization in face of reasonably huge event sequences. - MIDI controller mapping finally refactored to support some other MIDI event types than just CC (0xBn) ones. - Nitpicking fix: corrected main track-list (left pane) display when no track is currently selected. - libX11 is now being added explicitly to the build link phase, as seen necessary on some bleeding-edge distros eg. Fedora 13, Debian 6. (fixing bug #3050944). - New audio metronome bar and beat sample gain options. - Progressively, the observer pattern is being finally introduced, targeting all potentially automation controls and widgets as plain ground-zero for the (ultra-)long overdue automation feature. - MIDI controller mapping of still non-existing tracks were being implicitly assigned to the last, highly numbered, existing track. Now fixed. - Moving from old deprecated Qt3'ish custom event post handling into regular asynchronous signal/slot strategy. - Muting/soloing tracks while playback is looping was leaving current audio clip out-of-sync whenever that same track is later un-muted on any other preceding clip. Now hopefully fixed. - MIDI Clock support makes its first appearance. - All tempo (BPM) calculations are now compliant to the MIDI conventional equivalence between beat and quarter note (1/4, crotchet) as common standard time division. - Automatic audio time-stretch option is not enabled by default anymore. - Standard warning Apply button is now only shown when dismissing dialog changes are actually valid. - Make sure non-dedicated metronome and player buses are properly reset and reopen when changing regular audio buses (hopefully fixing bug item #3021645 - Crash after changing audio bus). - Hopefully, an outrageously old bug got squashed away, which was causing random impromptu crashes, most often when importing audio clips while looping and play-head is any near the loop end point. - General standard dialog buttons layout is now in place. - Fixed main track view off-limits play-head positioning. - Main tool-bar Time and Tempo spin-boxes, may now have their colors correct, as for most non-Qt based theme engines (ie. Gnome). Green text on black background has been and still is the the intended aspect design ;) - MIDI file import and internal sequence representation has been changed to be inclusive on all bank-select (CC#0,32) and program-change events which were previously discarded while honoring MIDI track properties. Interleaved SysEx events are now also preserved on their original sequence positions instead of squashing a duplicate into the MIDI bus SysEx setup. - Attempt to include the VeSTige header by default, as for minimal VST plugin support. - JACK transport support has been slightly rewritten, in fact the sync callback is now in effect for repositioning. - The MIDI clip editor (piano roll) widget won't be flagged as a tool window anymore. - A tempo adjustment tool is making inroads from the menu, as Edit/Clip/Tempo... (factory shortcut: F7). - Audio tracks auto-monitoring is now effective on playback. - Make sure to ask whether a dirty MIDI clip should be saved, upon resizing or stretching its edges (fixes bug #3017723). - Backward and Forward transport commands are now taking additional stops on loop points. - Attempt to optimize track solo/mute redundant transactions, in special regard to MIDI track events which were being duplicated on soloing and temporarily muted on unsoloing. Cheers && Enjoy (be happy!) -- rncbc aka Rui Nuno capela rncbc(a)rncbc.org

14 years, 5 months

on the soft synth midi jitters ...

by cal

I'm writing on behalf of a friend who's having trouble dealing with midi latency in a soft synth (possibly yoshimi) ... Given a jack period of N frames, the midi latency with the original code effectively ranges from N frames to 2 * N frames, which I guess qualifies it as jittery. So far my friend has tried a few things, but there's no workable solution as yet. What seemed most promising was to break the audio generation into smaller blocks, applying pending midi events between blocks. Sadly, that drags the creation and destruction of note objects into the realtime jack process callback path. Latency improves, but the number of notes you can get away with before it all falls in a heap is significantly reduced. Getting the destruction of dead notes out of the realtime path is trivial, not so the creation of new ones. Even with a pool of pre-allocated note objects, it seems the amount of initialization code per note is still a real limiting factor on how busy things can get before it all falls apart. Such is life (for my "friend"). cheers, Cal

14 years, 5 months

CUDA implementation for calf

by Max Tandetzky

Hallo, I am new here, so I hope this is the right place to talk about what I want to do. I want to make a CUDA implementation of the algorithms from the calf-plugins. On the front end there should be placed a button (or something else) to (de-)activate the CUDA support. I have already written a jack-program (which makes some simple changes on audio data) using CUDA. It works good and at a first sight the performance looks promisingly. I have read a part of the mailing list archive and found out that there already was a discussion about audio processing with CUDA. I know there are some reasons for not using CUDA like the duty to use the proprietary Nvida driver, the limitation that only people who have an Nvidia card will have a benefit and so on. But the CUDA implementation may show which performance can be reached and may beuseful for Nvidia users immediately. I know there is OpenCL but it is not as sophisticated as CUDA at the moment, will have less performance than CUDA and I do not have the time to learn OpenCl at the moment (but the project has to be finished soon). I heard it is not too much work to transfer existing CUDA code to OpenCl code later (assuming there is already an OpenCL implementation for all CUDA functions which were used). So I want to do this with CUDA. At the moment I have some questions: 1. Is there anybody has already done or is doing something like this? 2. Where can I get information to make any specific changes on the calf code? (I examined it a bit but it will take time to understand the structure of the program when I only have the code, especially the part for the GUI seems to be conceptualized a bit more complex.) It would be nice if I can get some help here. Regards Max Tandetzky

14 years, 5 months

Roger Linn should open source Linnstrument & release on meego :-)

by Niels Mayer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoAOx97G8ew http://www.gizmag.com/roger-linn-linnstrument-digital-music-interface/15155/ ........ Sadly, that's unlikely to happen anytime soon - because the TouchCo multitouch pad that Linn used in the production of his prototype has been withdrawn from production. Apparently Amazon bought up the technology earlier this year ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/technology/04amazon.html?_r=1 ) with a view to using it in the Kindle eBook reader, but has completely shelved it and shut down the TouchCo operation, presumably due to the ongoing Intellectual Property chest-beating, suing and counter-suing going on in the multitouch arena right now. So the TouchCo website has nothing but a sad placeholder to offer ( http://touchco.com/ ), and Linn has nothing but his pre-production prototype to work with, ruling out the possibility of a LinnStrument hitting the market in the immediate future. ........ Could the meego touch API support the features needed by the instrument used in the above Youtube Video of Roger Linn? Some of the swipes and other gestures demonstrated in the video are available in http://apidocs.meego.com/mtf/gestures.html but an important one isn't: multitouch pressure sensitivity that is equivalent to "polyphonic aftertouch" on a MIDI keyboard -- allowing analog pressure readings to be taken continuously and simultaneously per touch. Is there interest in making such devices part of the "use case" for meego touch? And are there any such displays&touchsensors available for use with Meego capable hardware such as the beagleboard? I imagine one could extrapolate touch pressure by looking at how much area each touch consumes, dynamically -- (assuming a normal human finger whose tip would deform and cover more surface area with application of more pressure). Niels http://nielsmayer.com

14 years, 5 months

Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch

by Louigi Verona

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 :) 2. Can this program be jackified and is that a lot of work? -- Louigi Verona http://www.louigiverona.ru/

14 years, 5 months

Re: [LAD] [PD-dev] question about multithreaded externals in Pd

by Ivica Ico Bukvic

First of all, my apologies to all for x-posting of the original matter--I did not realize there was such a major overlap in user base on pd-list and pd-dev lists making my x-post truly redundant. > since rPars can't be used by any other thread, you need to make a copy > for each thread. This must be it! You are absolutely right as there is no guarantee rPars won't get destructed (with the end of the constructor function) before the worker thread is properly instantiated. FWIW, instead of creating a copy of rPars, I've actually gone with Robin's suggestion to use sched_yield() and have a wait condition which is cleared once the worker thread has spawned to ensure it will get the necessary data from rPars before they are destructed as follows: void *pd_cwiid_pthreadForAudioUnfriendlyOperations(void *ptr) { threadedFunctionParams *rPars = (threadedFunctionParams*)ptr; t_wiimote *x = rPars->wiimote; t_float local_led = 0; t_float local_rumble = 0; unsigned char local_rpt_mode = x->rpt_mode; while(x->unsafe > -1) { pthread_mutex_lock(&x->unsafe_mutex); if ((local_led == x->led) && (local_rumble == x->rumble) && (local_rpt_mode == x->rpt_mode)) { if (x->unsafe) x->unsafe = 0; //signal that the thread init is complete pthread_cond_wait(&x->unsafe_cond, &x->unsafe_mutex); } //snip static void *pd_cwiid_new(t_symbol* s, int argc, t_atom *argv) { //snip // spawn threads for actions known to cause sample drop-outs threadedFunctionParams rPars; rPars.wiimote = x; pthread_mutex_init(&x->unsafe_mutex, NULL); pthread_cond_init(&x->unsafe_cond, NULL); pthread_create( &x->unsafe_t, NULL, (void *) &pd_cwiid_pthreadForAudioUnfriendlyOperations, (void *) &rPars); // wait until other thread has properly intialized so that // rPars do not get destroyed before the thread has gotten its // pointer information while(x->unsafe) { //must use as many yields as necessary as there is no //guarantee that one will be enough //also on Linux use sched_yield //rather than pthread_yield sched_yield(); } //snip Many thanks all for your help on this one! Hopefully the existence of this thread will help others who may be looking for similar solutions. Best wishes, Ico

14 years, 6 months

question about multithreaded externals in Pd

by Ivica Ico Bukvic

Hi all, I am wondering if anyone can shed some light on the following predicament. I am by no means a multi-threading guru so any insight would be most appreciated. The following are relevant excerpts from the code of an external. AFAIK the external initializes mutex and cond and spawns a secondary worker thread that deals with audio-unfriendly (xrun-causing) write operations to the wiimote and terminates it when the object is destructed waiting for the thread to join back and then destroying the mutex. Now, if I add a bit of usleep right after the thread has been spawned as part of the constructor (as included below) the external seems very stable (e.g. cutting and pasting it as fast as keyboard allows, or in other words constructing and destructing instances of it as fast as possible does not result in a crash). Yet, when one does not use usleep right after spawning the secondary (worker) thread in the constructor, the whole thing is very crash-prone, almost as if the spawning of thread does not go well unless given adequate time to do get things all into sync, so to say, even though this makes to me no sense as the way I understand it the constructor does not move ahead until pthread_create does not return a value (which in this case I am not bothering to read). Curiously, when not using usleep, a crash may occur right at creation time, at any point while the object exists, and even as late as during its destruction. Any ideas? P.S. I am also including the entire file for those interested in trying it out. Best wishes, Ico Relevant excerpts (in random order and incomplete to allow for greater legibility): //struct defining the object typedef struct _wiimote { t_object x_obj; // standard pd object (must be first in struct) ... //Creating separate threads for actions known to cause sample drop-outs pthread_t unsafe_t; pthread_mutex_t unsafe_mutex; pthread_cond_t unsafe_cond; t_float unsafe; ... t_float led; ... } t_wiimote; //constructor static void *pd_cwiid_new(t_symbol* s, int argc, t_atom *argv) { ... x->led = 0; // spawn threads for actions known to cause sample drop-outs threadedFunctionParams rPars; rPars.wiimote = x; pthread_mutex_init(&x->unsafe_mutex, NULL); pthread_cond_init(&x->unsafe_cond, NULL); pthread_create( &x->unsafe_t, NULL, (void *) &pd_cwiid_pthreadForAudioUnfriendlyOperations, (void *) &rPars); //WHY IS THIS NECESSARY? I thought that pthread_create call will first finish spawning thread before proceeding usleep(100); //allow thread to sync (is there a better way to do this?) ... } //destructor static void pd_cwiid_free(t_wiimote* x) { if (x->connected) { pd_cwiid_doDisconnect(x); //this one has nothing to do with thread but rather disconnects the wiimote } x->unsafe = -1; //to allow secondary thread to exit the while loop pthread_mutex_lock(&x->unsafe_mutex); pthread_cond_signal(&x->unsafe_cond); pthread_mutex_unlock(&x->unsafe_mutex); pthread_join(x->unsafe_t, NULL); pthread_mutex_destroy(&x->unsafe_mutex); ... } //worker thread void pd_cwiid_pthreadForAudioUnfriendlyOperations(void *ptr) { threadedFunctionParams *rPars = (threadedFunctionParams*)ptr; t_wiimote *x = rPars->wiimote; t_float local_led = 0; t_float local_rumble = 0; unsigned char local_rpt_mode = x->rpt_mode; while(x->unsafe > -1) { pthread_mutex_lock(&x->unsafe_mutex); if ((local_led == x->led) && (local_rumble == x->rumble) && (local_rpt_mode == x->rpt_mode)) { pthread_cond_wait(&x->unsafe_cond, &x->unsafe_mutex); } if (local_led != x->led) { local_led = x->led; //do something } } if (local_rumble != x->rumble) { local_rumble = x->rumble; //do something else } ... pthread_mutex_unlock(&x->unsafe_mutex); } pthread_exit(0); } //an example of how the thread is affected by the main thread void pd_cwiid_setLED(t_wiimote *x, t_floatarg f) { if (x->connected) { x->led = f; pthread_mutex_lock(&x->unsafe_mutex); pthread_cond_signal(&x->unsafe_cond); pthread_mutex_unlock(&x->unsafe_mutex); } }

14 years, 6 months

[ANN] Linux Audio Conference 2011

by Victor Lazzarini

Dear Linux Audio developer, user, composer, musician, philosopher and anyone else interested, you are invited to the... Linux Audio Conference 2011 The Open Source Music and Audio Software Conference May 6-8 2011 Music Department, National University of Ireland, Maynooth Maynooth, Co.Kildare, Ireland http://music.nuim.ie As in previous years, we will have a full programme of talks, workshops and music. Two calls will be issued, a Call for Papers (see below) and Call for Music (soon to be announced). Further information will be found in the LAC2011 website (under construction). ================ CALL FOR PAPERS ================= Papers on the following categories (but not limited to them) are now invited for submission: * Ambisonics * Education * Live performance * Audio Hardware Support * Signal Processing * Music Composition * Audio Languages * Sound Synthesis * Audio Plugins * MIDI * Music Production * Linux Kernel * Physical Computing * Interface Design * Linux Distributions * Networked Audio * Video * Games * Media Art * Licensing We very much welcome practical papers resp. software demos ("how I use Linux Audio applications to create my music/media art"). Paper length: 4-8 pages, with abstract (50-100 words) and up to 5 keywords. Language: English. The copyright of the paper remains with the author, but we reserve the right to create printed proceedings from all submitted (and accepted) papers. IMPORTANT DATES: Submission deadline: 15/January 2011 Notification of acceptance: 7/March 2011 Camera-ready papers: 1/April 2011 Queries: Victor Lazzarini, NUI Maynnooth (victor.lazzarini(a)nuim.ie)

14 years, 6 months

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Linux-audio-dev October 2010