[PD] [OT] My humble contribution to the Linux Audio community

[Ivica Bukvic]

Hello fellow audio enthusiasts!

I've been lurking around this list for a while now, occasionally
spamming everyone with my assortment of questions :-). Well, finally the
day has come for me to give my humble contribution to the Linux-audio
community.

I would like to announce immediate availability of my latest creation
called RTMix (which is a tentative name due to my obvious lack of
inspiration, and also due to fact that the app was originally conceived
as the front-end to the RTCmix real-time sound processing scripting
language).

SO WHAT IS RTMix?
RTMix is a performance tool geared towards persons interested in live
and interactive electro-acoustic music. It can be used as a performer
tutor, event-triggering engine, as well as an accurate timer with
implemented warning countdown timer and customizable visual warning
display. The whole app has its own custom scripting language which
strongly resembles Paul Lansky's RT, and has limited error-checking
capability. A lot is yet to be implemented and the code is yet to
undergo some radical changes. Thus, I am currently providing only the
binary version to the community.

The primary impetus for me to write this app is that in the world of
electronic and electroacoustic music (here I speak primarily of the type
of art practiced in the most of the college-level electronic music
studios) I stumbled across many performances utilizing live interaction
between performer and a computer, and every time I saw a multitude of
technical problems arise with such performances, including various
last-minute alterations, use of primitive equipment (i.e. stopwatch),
utilization of complex max/msp/pd/jmax patches that offered one-time
solutions, and overall simplicity of the piece due to technical
limitations imposed by the utilized interface.

RTMix, as a potential (and possibly at this point unique all-in-one)
solution to this problem, offers a user-friendly and versatile approach,
where composer is capable of easily altering the performance, saving the
performance score, and providing textual and visual warnings to the
performer in order to improve the timing accuracy and tighter
interaction between the cpu and performer. My aim was also to create an
app that would have a minimal cpu-usage footprint, keeping it under 2%
(at least on my machine).

CURRENT LIMITATIONS:
The app is not perfect even by a long shot, but it offers some very
user-friendly features especially for the real-time live performance
venues. All of the sound events, due to fact that the app acts as the
front-end to other apps (potentially being able to trigger RTCmix,
Csound, or even pd, and jmax events -- practically anything that could
be triggered from the shell), are triggered as separate backgrounded
system calls. This is unfortunately the only way I could come up in
order to ensure compatibility with different kinds of audio-processing
apps. The issue of polling sound streams from different apps/processes
is a long-standing problem for me in Linux. I've addressed this issue
before on this list, and I've yet to see a good low-latency solution.
For right now, I would suggest to use esd, or even better artsd, until
something better shows up. Of course, this kind of implementation has
some serious latency issues, but as I said before, this is an issue with
the way Linux deals with its /dev/dsp resources, rather than my app's
fault.

"SO HOW DO I GET IT?"
The app is free, and once I release the code, it will be covered under
the GPL license. The only reason I am withholding the source code at
this point is that I want to implement the core features in a stable
fashion before I allow the community to delve into the code. Current
version is 0.15, but don't be fooled by the version number. The current
version is fully functional and I have yet to see it crash -- I just
happen to be rather conservative with my version numbers... :-)

Current binary is available on my site:
http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/~ico/

A word of caution, my site is flash animation-heavy, so if you don't
feel like loading all the flash stuff and browsing through my page (esp.
if you have a low-bandwidth connection) here are the direct links (if
you opt for this faster approach, I would like you to at least e-mail me
and let me know that you downloaded the app, or do so by posting a
message or two on my personal board found at
http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/cgi-bin/ico/yabb/YaBB.cgi, ;-):

http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/~ico/rtmix.gif (for a screenshot)
http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/~ico/rtmix-0.15.tar.gz (for the binary
package)

Limited docs and install instructions are included. The binary has been
compiled on the MDK 8.1, using latest non-cooker compilers, utilizing
QT/KDE 2.2, and was tested on the latest Redhat and Mandrake
distributions.

I am sure I've missed some info after quickly compiling this long of a
blurb-e-mail, so, please e-mail me if you have any more questions. I
sincerely hope that you will find this app as useful as I do. Please
send me your comments and thoughts, as well as potential successes
you've had using the app. Thanks!

Sincerely,


Ivica Ico Bukvic, composer, multimedia sculptor, 
programmer, webmaster & computer consultant 
http://meowing.ccm.uc.edu/~ico/ 
ico at fuse.net 
============================
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