Hey hey,
I have just released "A Moment of Passing", which my friend Ritual Notes and I
wrote and performed together. The recording is a few months old, but I just
got back my production environment.
https://youtu.be/dmTR8Rm70sY
My friend plays the flute, I play the piano. We did record it in two goes,
since I don't have two headphones or anything.
It's a sad little song, with a few sunnier moments and it came to be on the
spur of the moment. There will be another song, which was properly composed,
in two days time.
Enjoy and best wishes,
Jeanette
--
* Website: http://juliencoder.de - for summer is a state of sound
* Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMS4rfGrTwz8W7jhC1Jnv7g
* Audiobombs: https://www.audiobombs.com/users/jeanette_c
* GitHub: https://github.com/jeanette-c
Make all the clouds disappear
Put all your fears to rest <3
(Britney Spears)
Hello all,
The purpose of this post is to gather some opinions on the
use of 'tape distortion' plugins.
The way an analog magnetic tape recorder distorts the signal
is quite complicated. The non-linear response is mainly due
to the hysteresis of the magnetisation process, and how this
interacts with the HF bias added to the recorded signal.
Simplifying things a bit, as the tape moves past the recording
head and away from it, it goes through several cycles of an
hysteresis loop with decreasing amplitude, and it finally
converges to some value more or less proportional to the signal.
The bias signal itself does not remain on the tape, or at most
at a very low level.
The same process but with just a very high level HF bias is
used to erase the tape.
Simulating this accurately is quite complicated, and very CPU
intensive. The sample rate must be at least twice the bias
frequency (around 100 kHz for 'pro' equipment) and for each
sample you need to evaluate the hysteresis loop up to a hundred
times (depending on tape speed) to simulate the convergence.
Over the past few months I've written the code to do this,
with the aim to present a useful 'tape emulation' plugin
at the next LAC. It uses a somewhat simplified form of the
Preisach algorithm for the hysteresis.
<http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/downloads/preisach-model.pdf>
But the first results are somewhat sobering.
Have a look at
<http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/downloads/tapesaturation.png>
This shows the tranfer function (recorded magnetic signal as
a function of the input) for three values of the HF bias.
The blue line is what you get without bias. It result in a
very smooth saturation for high level signals, but a low
amplitude signal will be severly distorted due to the flat
region around zero.
As bias level is increased, this effect is reduced and the
low level gain increases up to some maximum. This is shown
by the orange curve.
The recommended way to set the correct bias level is to
further increase it until the small signal gain is reduced
by a few dB (typically 1 or 2 dB, depending on tape type).
This is shown by the green curve.
The central part of this is very linear (less than 1% THD).
But now the smooth saturation is almost transformed into
hard clipping. The sharp bend in the curve occurs when the
signal amplitude is higher than the bias amplitude.
The only effect that remains in a complete simulation is
the result of the EQ applied to the signal to be recorded.
Higher frequencies have a 'self erasure' effect (which is
nicely reproduced by the simulation) and so need to be
amplified. The net result is that they will saturate at
a lower input level.
How much EQ is required depends mainly on tape speed, higher
speeds need less. At the most popular 'pro' speed (381 mm/s)
this would be something around 10 dB at 10 kHz. At the higher
(762 mm/s) speed typically used for 'master tapes' it's just
a few dB.
So what does effectively remain of the 'smooth saturation
and compression' that is claimed to give tape recording its
magical 'warm' character ? Is it just a myth ?
I also simulated the green curve directly without going
through the complicated full simulation, and honestly,
to me that sounds just the same. And unless you really
use very high levels (much more than would actually be
used) the net effect is marginal. Maybe the hard clipping
can be useful when applied to individual tracks (e.g.
drums or bass), but then there are much simpler ways
to do this than 'tape emulation'.
Comments invited !!
Cheers to Ingo Molnar!
I am not sure how many users are interested in such news, since there
might be still a linux-audio-dev community that I am not part of anymore.
Nevertheless, it amuses me that basically half my life ago, I struggled
and tested and read tons of stuff, invested a lot of time to get some
nice audio stuff going on linux and some rather crappy hardware...
and now, 20 years later, the foundation to all of it - a real-time
kernel - did not disappear but was developed and maintained until the
eagle has landed.
Again, cheers to Ingo and all that contributed!
Yours,
Tobias.
Hey hey,
and here's the second one. This time it's a "proper composition", with more of
a late 19th century feel. A more positive and intense piece as well.
https://youtu.be/SukYCNZ82LU
The piano had been played months before the flute could be recorded. Due to
time considerations several takes had to be comp'ed, which you can hear. My
apologies. Next time, there will hopefully be more time to forego that
practise.
Best wishes and, mainly, enjoy,
Jeanette
--
* Website: http://juliencoder.de - for summer is a state of sound
* Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMS4rfGrTwz8W7jhC1Jnv7g
* Audiobombs: https://www.audiobombs.com/users/jeanette_c
* GitHub: https://github.com/jeanette-c
I used to think
I had the answers to everything
But now I know
... :) <3
(Britney Spears)
Guitarix.vst is the full blown guitarix stack as VST3 plugin for Linux,
using Juce to wrap the guitarix engine into a VST3 plugin.
It allow to load/save your presets, download presets from online and
load external LV2 plugs and IR Files, like the guitarix stand-alone version.
But all that as a VST3 plugin in your DAW. All parameters been exposed
to the DAW, so accessible for automation.
Other than the stand-alone, the VST3 version allows to switch the input
to a real stereo input, so it may match better your channel strip in the
DAW.
For Hdpi users, the GUI is full scalable.
New in this release:
- Add support for Parallel Processing (process second mono chain in
parallel when stereo is selected)
- Fix downloading online presets
- Update included Juce modules to v7.0.12
- Hide disabled controllers in main amp when no-tube is selected
- Update included guitarix engine to latest git head
Project Page:
https://github.com/brummer10/guitarix.vst
Release Page:
https://github.com/brummer10/guitarix.vst/releases/tag/v0.4
regards
hermann
Does anyone know of software that can generate MIDI messages from a touchpad?
The idea would be to send CCs to a sequencer or soft synth, but being able to
send it to an external hardware device would also be very useful.
--
Will J Godfrey
https://willgodfrey.bandcamp.com/http://yoshimi.github.io
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.
Fluida is a LV2 wrapper around Fluidsynth for Linux and Windows
allowing to load and control Fluidsynth as LV2 plugin.
This release of Fluida add support for Fluidsynth SoundFont Modulators
Envelope and Filter with the following MIDI bindings:
- MIDI CC 73 Soundfont modulator Envelope Attack Time
- MIDI CC 72 Soundfont modulator Envelope Release Time
- MIDI CC 74 Soundfont modulator Filter Cutoff
- MIDI CC 71 Soundfont modulator Filter Resonance
Project Page (Source Code):
https://github.com/brummer10/Fluida.lv2
Release Page (Binaries):
https://github.com/brummer10/Fluida.lv2/releases/tag/v0.9.3
Hi!
Using jack a long time, now. I never activated "monitoring" on my RME
HDSP 9652 because I did not know how to make use of it. In qjackctl the
big block of additional 26 ports was always in the way…
Now, with pipewire, monitoring is activated by default. Surely, I can
deactivate it through some configuration I have to investigate further.
(Or a neat person here tells me how… :) ) But before I do this I want
to make sure not cancelling a handy feature I would have definitely
used if I was smart enough…
So: What are these "monitor" ports and what can I do with them?
And sorry for the newbie question although I'm not a newbie, at all…
Greets!
Mitsch
