[PD] [OT] FOSS audio tools (was: sound for blender apricot opensource game)

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Roman Haefeli hat gesagt: // Roman Haefeli wrote:

> thanks for mentioning those. we're getting a bit OT now, but just a few
> quick comments:
> 
> -ardour is certainly a great and advanced DAW, no doubt. recording can
> be definitely done with FOSS.
> 
> - jamin is cool and powerful software too, but it follows the wrong
> strategy: you can only use it in real-time, since it is a jack-plugin.
> having to render in realtime is a pain and dangerous in many situations
> (all drop-outs are in the resulting file). OTOH, LADSPA plugins don't
> support customized guis, AFAIK, therefor there is no option to do
> something like jamin as a LADSPA plugin. IMHO, most LADSPA plugins might
> be good scientific applications, but definitely not for everyday studio
> work (no visual feedback, strange scales of parameters).

LADSPA plugins don't have a GUI at all, so every GUI you get is a
customized one. LADSPA-plugins itself are perfectly able to be run in
non-realtime. For example if you render an Ardour session with LADSPA
plugins in it to file, this is done in non-realtime fashion. Often
it's done faster than realtime.

> - both ardour, jamin and almost all sound editors i found don't have an
> accelerated gui. scrolling causes high cpu peaks.i don't know any
> software on windows, that uses cpu for the gui part. it's sad, that i
> have hardware (gpu) in my box, which isn't used at all (but only when i
> do Gem).

The actually drawing is accelerated by the graphics card already.
However a tricky question that cannot simply be shovelled to the
gfx-card (so easily) is how to decide which samples to display at all.
For example when zoomed out, you don't need to draw every single
sample. Ardour uses a sophisticated algorithm for deciding things like
that, AFAIK. (IIRC Paul Davis once said that this was one of the
hardest parts in Ardour to get right.) Compare that to Pd, which
doesn't even bother with trying to be smart here, which results in
slowdown when moving arrays with many elements, even when they are
displayed in only a small area.

All in all to me Ardour doesn't feel slow at all. Audacity OTOH is
slow (and all around terrible for my taste anyway) as was the last
version of SoundForge for Windows, that I had to run at work - though
I admit that this was some years ago. But Ardour feels very snappy and
quick here.

> - there is not audio editor around, that even loosely fulfills my needs.
> probably the makers of Elephants Dream felt the same. Some of them lack
> native jack support, others use very strange sets of shortcuts, or are
> pretty raw in general. 

Uhm, while Blender certainly is great, you aren't seriously trying to
tell me you really think its shortcuts are intuitive, are you?!? ;-)
Someone who mastered Blender should have no problems with Ardour,
given he invests about a tenth of the time to learn it.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                                     _ ______footils.org__