[PD] sound for blender apricot opensource game

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Feb 2, 2008, at 9:11 PM, Roman Haefeli wrote:

> On Sat, 2008-02-02 at 20:04 -0500, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>> Yeah, I'd love to help out where I can.  I was really bummed that
>> Elephants Dream didn't use FOSS for sound, I think they didn't try
>> hard enough.  I've done a lot of very reliable installations using
>> Pd, if it is good enough for the NY Times lobby, it's good enough for
>> Blender. :)
>
> it's not about reliability, it's probably more about workflow. i agree
> with the makers of Elephants Dream, that it's hard to find FOSS  
> software
> for advanced sound editing. i speak from frustrating personal
> experience. i've spent hours trying to find even only an appropriate
> sound editor and it makes me sad to see, that so many people work  
> on so
> many different projects, but none of them is actually usuable in a
> professional environment (and noone seems to want to bundle the energy
> with others). i also noticed, that in the audio foss world some people
> tend to stick to elitism and don't want to work on making things more
> usuable (just hang a day around in #alsa). i don't want to generalize
> that, but that was my experience outside the nice and friendly pd- 
> world.
> it's sad, but especially for mastering tasks i still have to stick  
> with
> proprietary tools on a proprietary operating system, since working  
> with
> foss tools is still way far from being as efficient as with the tools
> that are usually used in studios. i am no expert in 3d world, but i
> think that this doesn't apply to blender as much. it seems to me that
> blender is a very advanced software. but back to pd: no matter how  
> cool
> pd is, you wouldn't want to use it to edit a radio jingle with many
> layers to exactly a certain lenght with mastering (compressing/ 
> limiting
> etc), would you?

Blender lacks some standard tools that all of the big ones have  
(Maya, 3D Studio, etc) and yet they made amazing animations with it.   
A core reason for that project was to figure out the problems with  
Blender in a production environment and work on improving them.

It is a shame they did not take the same approach with the audio.   
The synthesis was done using Reactor, for example.  I think that Pd  
is pretty clearly a more capable real-time synth than Reactor, but  
yes, it's rough around the edges.

As for mastering, I did a lot of work as a sound designer in Sound  
Forge/Windows back in 2000, and now I use Audacity.  Admittedly, I  
don't do super elaborate mastering.  I will say that Audacity could  
use more polishing and some efficiency tweaks, and a fancier GUI  
might be useful.  But bottom line, it gets the job done.  If the idea  
of the movie was to be a free/open project, I think it was a copout  
to use proprietary tools for audio.  Audacity now is better than  
Sound Forge was in 2000.  Lots of professionals were using Sound  
Forge in 2000, using Audacity now you'll be better off than them.

.hc


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As we enjoy great advantages from inventions of others, we should be  
glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and  
this we should do freely and generously.         - Benjamin Franklin