I'm looking for an audio processing language or library which will allow me to experiment with different synthesis techniques. I've looked at Processing which I think is great at what it does, but haven't found any inspiring (and simple) audio libraries.
As a baseline, I want to simply create my own sample buffers and play them back (ideally in realtime). As a plus, the ability to handle MIDI events would be great. I'm an experienced C++ programmer so I could do it natively on but had hoped there was a more DSL (domain specific language) approach.
I have access to Windows, Mac or Linux so not too bothered yet about platform. Other languages I can deal with are C#, Java & Python.
Thanks
James
Depending on how much you want to stay out of the low-level housekeeping details, you may want to look at CSound , or if you want to not actually write code, the patching-based system PureData is great to work with. As #Lou points out, ChucK is interesting (but was too buggy to use the last time I checked it out).
If you really do want to write code, look at the Synthesis Toolkit, a set of C++ classes for audio processing and synthesis.
For an app framework, I recommend JUCE, which has incredibly nice cross-platform handling of audio/midi IO and GUI elements.
Max MSP is an audio production tool that is highly expressive.
I guess you could say it's a high-level tool, and not a low-level programming language. My impression of it is that it's geared towards the technical musician or the artistic engineer, but anyway it kicks ass and you could go low-level with it if you want.
I've always been a big fan of SuperCollider. It's designed for Mac OS X but also works on Linux.
The language is mostly based on SmallTalk, and it's pretty easy to pick up if you understand the basics of functional programming. The quality of the sound output by the SC Server is very good and there is plenty of documentation both built into the app environment and available online.
One interesting point of SuperCollider is the usage on android devices, and it's intercommunication with python trough out other modules.
Here goes an example
I know you didn't say Ruby, but check out Archaeopteryx
https://github.com/gilesbowkett/archaeopteryx/wiki
or ChucK
http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/
Have a look at NAudio, an open source .NET audio SDK for working with audio files and devices in Windows. Some features include:
http://naudio.codeplex.com/
NAudio Features:
Play back audio using a variety of APIs
Decompress audio from different Wave Formats
Record audio using WaveIn, WASAPI or ASIO
Read and Write standard .WAV files
Mix and manipulate audio streams using a 32 bit floating mixing engine
Extensive support for reading and writing MIDI files
Full MIDI event model
Basic support for Windows Mixer APIs
A collection of useful Windows Forms Controls
Some basic audio effects, including a compressor
Related
Here is what i like to achieve:
I like to play around in creating "new" software / hardware instruments.
Sound processing and creation is always managed by software. But one could play the instrument via ultrasonic distance sensor for example. Another idea is to start playback when someone interrupts the light of a photoelectric barrier and so on....
So the instrument would play common sounds, but has to be used in an unusal way. For example, the ultrasonic instrument would play a sound if it detects something in a certain distance. The sound could be manipiulated in pitch for example if the distance gets smaller.
Basically i like to playback a sound sample and manipualte this in realtime.
I guess i have to use WAV samples for this, right? And which programming language do you think fits best for this task?
Edited after kevins hint: please kick me into the right direction - give me a hint where to start.
Thanks in advance
Since you're using the the Processing tag, you can try Processing.
It comes with a sound library like Minim or you can install beads which is great. There's actually a nice book on it: Sonifying Processing
You might find SuperColider fun as well.
The main thing is what are you comfortable with at the moment ?
If Processing syntax looks intimidating, you can actually try a different programming paradigm like data flow. In which case you can use PureData(free, opensource) or MaxMSP(very similar, but commercial). The idea is rather than typing instructions, you connect boxes with wires which is fun and the examples are great too.
If you're into c++ there are plenty of libraries. On the creative side, there's a nice set of libraries called OpenFrameworks that's easy and fun to use. If this is your cup of tea, have a peek at Maximilian.
Bottomline is: there are multiple options to achieve the same task. Choose the best tool for your (based on your background) or try each and see what you like best.
You asked "And which programming language do you think fits best for this task?" - I would also suggest using Processing. I have been used Processing to work with sounds previously. And in all cases I used Minim. It has many UgenS to generate sounds programmatically.
Also, you wants to integrate with some sensors. I'm not sure what types of sensors you will use, but Processing goes pretty well with different Arduino modules and sensors. Check this link for more direction.
Furthermore, you can export your project as .exe or executable .jar files. And their JS version (P5.js) works almost the same as the Java version.
How can I play and synthesize custom waves in Lazarus/Free Pascal? The solution has to be realtime-friendly, as it is for a game engine. It should be also multi-platform, so it can be used on win32, Linux and Mac. FMOD/BASS are out (even if aplicable) as I don't want to pay fees if I will want to use it commercially.
There are solutions to that. My favourite library is Steinberg's ASIO. It is a very simple API, it's got wrappers for Linux, Windows, MAC and i guess some other platforms as well. It is a professional API for low-latency recording / playback. You usually need a soundcard that supports it, but recently some drivers emerged, using native platform API to emulate ASIO device (e.g. ASIO4ALL in windows).
ASIO's got a simple function in which buffers are swapped, where you can generate your wavefrom procedurally to be played back practically immediately (there are latencies in order of milliseconds). That's for the realtimeness.
The API as such is royalty free which means you can use it in a commercial project and don't have to pay anyone.
As for Pascal bindings, I believe you will have to do that yourself. But the whole initialization and operation of ASIO is <100 lines of C/C++ code (and you actually only need to control sound synthesis and maybe device selection - ony two functions that need to be exported by the wrapper) so that really should not be hard at all.
I want to start on a hobby project that focuses on displaying audio files in a folder in a certain fashion and has the ability to play such an audio file and shows basic control options for playing. However, i'm struggling to find a fit programming language for this.
The displaying part shouldn't be too hard and can probably be done in most of the programming languages. The audio part is what concerns me the most since it's not the main focus of the project and should only do limited things (so it shouldn't be too hard) and i do not know anything about sound support in the programming languages i currently know. (Java, C and C++)
Specifically i would like to be able to do these things:
Play a sound file
Stop/pause a playing song
Adjust volume
Show a bar that displays the current position in the song
Most files will be .mp3 files but being able to process other formats is certainly a plus. Since this is just a small project it's ok if it runs just on Windows. Scalabilty would be nice but not required.
It would be nice to have a small overview of audio support/audio libraries of programming languages (i'm always up for something new) that can accomplish these simple things, in a not too complicated way, aswell as personal experiences.
In this way i hope to create a better understanding of which programming language fits my project best. (i would very much like to not have to change language mid-way the project)
--
Edit:
This is only for a later stage of the project if the first part was successfull: i will want to change the file names of the audio files that are displayed. (to make them follow a specific format)
I haven't written audio processing programs much, but I know a lot of them exist for C and C++. For Java perhaps, too, but I don't know Java. I had used audio with SDL in a game, but that doesn't have that many features and I don't recommend it.
There's this question asking for a library in C, and there are a couple of similar questions that SO brings up on the side. You may want to take a look at those.
You would also need to look for a library that loads different file types. SDL at least, only opens .wav files, which I believe most of the playback libraries would support. For MP3, you will most likely need an additional library. I know Audacity uses LAME Mp3 so I'm guessing that should be good.
Some of the functionalities you want is also doable by yourself. For example, knowing the length of the music and the amount you have already read, you will know how far in the audio you are. Adjusting the volume is also a multiplication (in the simplest case) that you can do on the audio data if the library doesn't provide it.
A very good choice seems to be PortAudio which is used by Audacity, and also recommended in the accepted answer of the question I mentioned above.
I've done audio apps in both Java and C++. Java development goes way faster because it's a more powerful language and has garbage collection, but JavaSound is a pretty awful solution for audio. Of course, there are wrappers for FFMPEG and other stuff, so you can get a lot of things working. Here's an example of a Java audio app: http://www.indabamusic.com/help/mantis
OTOH, C++ gives you lots of control, low latency and wealth of libraries. (another answer mentioned Portaudio, which is, indeed, great.) But you will definitely find it also has a much longer development cycle.
You can certainly do everything you want to do with either language.
I am looking for an audio dsp library for cleaning up some speech (voice) recording. I have not decided which language to use yet.
Here are the feature I am looking for:
Work in Linux and Windows
Importing MP3
Working with multiple channels mixing
Noise Filter
Bandpass filter
Compressor
I love to have these as well, but I can write my own if they are not available:
De-esser
multi-band compressor
Expender
Envelopes
(if you can suggest an application that do these in scripting / one mouse click, I will accept your answer too)
What about something like SoX?? http://sox.sourceforge.net/
Take a look at Juce from Raw Material Software.
It is free for non-commercial use, and very reasonably priced for commercial use. it also has a lot of built in audio capabilities (mixing, file I/O, etc.) and has a nice cross platform GUI toolkit as well.
Audacity does most of those things.
I've searched the net but didn't found anything interesting. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
I'm looking for sound synthesis API written on C, C++ or even Objective-C, which can synthesize different types of waves, effects are optional.
Here's a complete library/toolkit for FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis:
link1
link2
If you have time to spare... creating simple sound synthesis from scratch is actually a fun endeavor. If you create a small buffer of 256 16 bit samples which represent either a sine. a sawtooth, block or pulse, you can copy these to a live audiobuffer (e.g. a small buffer (say 16kb)) which constantly loops. By staying ahead of the playposition, and constantly filling up the buffer with new values, you can create the soundoutput.
You can use the small buffers to combine these in interesting ways (simplest is just to add them together (additive synthesis)).
The frequency of the tone can be manipulated by using a bigger or smaller sampling step through the small buffers. Amplitude can be manipulated by scaling the samples before putting them into the output buffer.
Great fun experimenting with this!
If you have this step nailed, you can add more sophisticated effects like filters (low pass, high pass, etc) and effects (reverbs, echoes, etc)
R
Have you looked at the synthesis toolkit (STK)? It's in C++ (I don't think ObjC is the right language for audio synthesis, in fact audio units, Apple's own way of doing audio stuff, including generators/filters/effects... is in C++).
STK will run on Mac OS X, and iOS no problem (CoreAudio is supported), but will also run on Linux and Windows (Direct sound and ASIO), using RtAudio. It's really nicely done and lightweight, these guys have spent a lot of time thinking about it and it will definitely give you a big head start. It can handle loads of different audio file formats + midi (and hopefully OSC soon...).
There is also Create and CLAM which is huge, these include GUI components and many other things which you might or might not want. If you're only interested in doing sound synthesis I really recommend STK.
PortAudio is also a great C API that we used last semester in an audio programming course. It provides an audio callback...what more could you need!?
I haven't tried incorporating it with anything in Objective-C yet, but will report back when I do.
Writing audio synthesis algorithms in C/obj-C is quite difficult in my opinion. I would recommend writing your signal processing algorithms using PureData and then use ZenGarden or libpd to embed and interpret the pd patches in your app.
Another C++ library is nsound:
http://nsound.sourceforge.net
One can generate any kind of modulated signal using the Generator class or using the provided Sine class. Each time-step can have it's own instantaneous frequency and phase offset.
You can also experiment with the Python module to prototype your algorithm quickly, then implement in C++. It can produce pretty matplotlib plots from Python and even from C++!
Have you looked at CSound? It's an incredibly flexible audio generation platform, and can handle everything from simple waveform generation to FM synthesis and all kinds of filters. It also provides MIDI support, and you can extend it by writing custom opcodes. There's a full C API and several C++ APIs as well.