[PD] nusmuk_audio WAS: Max Smoother Audio than Pd?

Roman Haefeli reduzierer at yahoo.de
Fri Apr 23 20:48:04 CEST 2010


On Fri, 2010-04-23 at 19:05 +0200, colet.patrice at free.fr wrote:

Thanks for your feedback.

>  There is no vu-meter in tracks, so we don't know where the signals come from, neither at each level it comes.

A VU-meter is very expensive to have in a Pd-window, unfortunately. In
cubase (and similar DAWs) those things are hardware accelerated (which
would be cool to have in Pd as well, also inside Pd windows).
> 
>  There is no peak value detection, we don't know what was the last highest peak value,
>  to find out what sound would overhelm the mixing equilibrium.

It's also rather expensive and not so straight forward to implement with
vanilla objects. Probably this could be done much more efficient with an
external. 

>  Using different colors for the different bus is a very good idea, and make gaining time 
>  for finding the good slider,
>  but some colors gives Mx an ugly apparence that could be avoided with choosing
> harmonious tones, for example a yellow handle over a white background slider, is just
> a pain for the eyes. Also the green color is very agressive. 

Hehe. If you think it's worth to work on that, I'm sure, that the author
(Enrique) wouldn't mind to include your changes. I didn't care too much
about it, but I hear what you're saying (this applies probably to most
netpd stuff.... it's [still] punk, you know, [and will probably ever
be])

>  Mixing sounds is a kind of computation where the engineer need know accurately
> which level he has to give to some tracks for getting a correct average power,

I partially agree - I prefer to have a visual feedback of what I'm doing
as well - OTOH it's the ears that finally judge the sound.

> for example if we add 3 Decibels we double power...
>  The necessary stuff is just a number box that would tell how much Db is modulated over a slider.
> 
> 
> here is my favorite mixing tool:
> 
> http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan07/images/cubase5_l.jpg

Yeah, definitely a good general purpose mixer.

> _ we can choose DAC~ input and output bus
> _ phase inversion
> _ Gain level
> _ Panning is over the number of output buses we choose
> _ A 'Listen' button has been added with 'Solo', but I didn't use it yet.
> _ we can record/play automation from the board.
> _ we can choose if the signal that goes to the bus is pre or post fader.
> _ same for vu-meter (all)
> _ we can record stuff passing through the mixer, if it's audio it records audio, if it's midi it records midi
> _ we can access directly to the instrument from the mixer track.
> _ there is an internal EQ, very usefull and very well implemented into to mixer track.
> _ we can group tracks into group tracks.
> _ we can save settings of each parts of the mixer.
> 
> there are also all the settings that has effect on all the the tracks, like hiding all different parts of the tracks
> or setting peak detection time, copy-paste track params, an track edit window  (so we can see all settings) ...

I _think_ this all could be done in Pd. Often when people make patches,
they start with the basic stuff and probably stop at some point, when
they don't feel the need any more to add more features. This makes Pd
patches look poor compared to their otherwise available counterparts. I
wouldn't mind having such a good mixer in Pd at all, though. But I also
don't see an urgent need for it. That's only my personal perspective, of
course.    

>  This mixer is a cool project, and I'd love to use it in mine, but I'd need to make a stand alone patch.
> is there such one?

No, not yet. But by removing all the netpd specific stuff and the
dynamic creation stuff, you could make one based on mx.

Roman





More information about the Pd-list mailing list