i develop gdam (gdam.ffem.org) which is about halfway between traktor and live. it's focus is dj mixing / live performance, although there is some synthesis and sequencing as well. like live, it keeps a database of songs, tempos, and other information; it has a "beat calculator" which shows beat markers over a waveform display; it can automatically align tracks by this beat information; it can timestretch and transpose. in fact, the more i learn about live the more similar it seems to what gdam has been doing. gdam can: play many tracks at once, supports wav aif mp3 ogg flac etc, any number of filters on each track, reorder filters without disrupting sounds, etc. hardware controllers include midi, joysticks, dancepad, "dj man" toy turntable, "thin air" interface based on ultrasonic rangefinders, any usb human interface device, etc. hardware control over almost everything, and an xml spec for writing "binding files" to accomplish complex macros and presets via any hardware controller. lots of great audio effects, the ability to perform multiple actions (start, stop, mute, switch loop, set filter params etc) with the mouse but trigger them all at the same instant, a flexible system for graphical skins, an OSX port, and tons of other features. gdam has 90% of the audio capabilities required for live-alike, maybe 100%. what is missing is primarily a compact graphical interface, geared towards a simple mix-and-match of locked loops. i spent a little time working on a live-style skin. it supports six channels at a time (multiple windows for 12 18 24 etc) you can start different channels in and out of phase, control multiple channels as if they were one (a "transport bus" lets user specify which channels are tied to the transport), solo and mute, switch samples cleanly within a channel, switch multiple channels at once, each channel has an effect stack, send any channel to headphones vs room, etc. if you work from gdam, you can get most of live's features by simply creating a custom skin which is compact and clean. there are a few limitations which require a little c programming; such as a tiny drift when swapping loops of different original tempos within the same channel. every shortcoming i've come across has been straightforward to fix, i just haven't gotten to all of them myself. if you are interested, browse the website and ask me questions. i can describe in more detail how our skin system works. the latest linux release of gdam is a bit old, but the CVS version has the "turntable array" skin which offers much of live's functionality without the nice layout. finally, think long and hard and repeatedly before starting a new project. whether or not you work with gdam, it is often much much much better to start from an established project rather than create your own. many one-person projects fail to meet their goals, there are dozens (hundreds?) of half-finished open-source audio apps. finding other people to work on your project can be difficult, especially if it is a new one; people like to start their own projects, and if you don't have an established code base they don't see any reason to work with you versus on their own. many projects end up requiring more time than expected just to get something useful running, much less feature complete. try to find an established project and improve it to do what you need. if not gdam, perhaps you could build something on top of puredata or some other existing app. working from the right app, not only is much of your required functionality already in place, but chances are there is lots of other funtionality you can incorporate to improve on live rather than spending your time catching up to it; for instance, live has one window and you can only run one instance. built on puredata or gdam, your live-alike would be one window, you could create multiple instances, run alongside other pd/gdam skins and tools, etc. -geoff

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Le 4 Juillet 2003 13:55, Adrian Gschwend a écrit : You should try the "phase locking vocoder" example patch that comes with Pure Data. This is good for time stretching, pitch shifting, and it can even "freeze" the sound. - -- Marc