Luppp: Stage 3

Hey All,

Got some great news... there was a nasty stupid bug in the GUI redraw of the waveforms, (which I mistakenly though was due to threading) but it turns out the code was entering a loop with an increment that evaluated to zero... But its fixed now! :)

So with the GUI up and running one can see how far along the loops are, and what "amount" of the loop is going to be played.. ie "zooming" in on the part of the loop that's active.

Also the engine has been getting some attention during the Linux Audio Conference, held in Maynooth this year! This means that initial CSound support exists, so effects & instruments can be coded up in CSound to be played live as if its an internal synth / effects box. Lots of new possibilites now, and due to the csound .csd files being text based, they will be real easy to share & merge, allowing all users to contribue & share presets for effects with eachother.. :)

Mandatory screenshot:

Till next! -Harry

AVBin : Your favorite interface to Audio & Video

Hey,

Today I spent some time trying to work out the best way to load AV streams (ie: .avi, .vob, .mp3 etc) files into me program. So there are a nice 100 or so ways to do this with different libraries. But what's LGPL and usable? There's a good question.

After a good bit of googling around I found FFMpeg, LibAVCodec, LibAVFormat, LibAVFilter etc... all hard to link to, seperate fast-moving API's and breaking ABI's... nightmare.

In comes LibAVBin, a "thin wrapper" around all the above libraries, and abstracts away the details. Still getting the example to work is a little messy, so heres my own experience with it as of 09-04-11.

Grab the source here: http://code.google.com/p/avbin/

Then read the readme, and hit the SVN command to grab the latest FFMpeg.

./build.sh the library, there's a couple of errors in main, cast "malloc" to (void*), and fix whatever else is needed... I forget!

Then grab: http://code.google.com/p/avbin/source/browse/trunk/example/avbin_dump.c

That's the basic code for analysing a file's media content. From there it should be easy enough to see what's needed. The top of the header file has a nice "tutorial" on what functions need to be called in what order. I'm sure you'll work it out. Any questions, fire away!

Cheers, -Harry

Exams looming, projects due

Hey,

It's the exam time of year again, so Luppp has been laid to rest for a while, only to (hopefully) be revived once may 12th comes... Many projects due, much work to be doing.

Some small adjustments have been made to the source in the last weeks, but no real new features were implemented, although there is a bit of "conceptual" work going on. A Fluidsynth Soundfont player should be quite easy to integrate, as well as a wavetable synthesiser..

Then some sequencing tools and songs can be created... :-) Well ok, there's a lot of "load/save" stuff still to go on, and some theoretical threading jumble to be sorted out before that day. Lucky there's no deadlines here!

Cheers, -Harry

Luppp: Slow Steady Progress

Hey,

Not that much new fancy graphics or anything to show off today. Just that the internal audio / midi code is getting a needed clean-up and haul-over. Also some hard-coded MIDI mappings are in place, currently thinking about how to best implement the binding of the controls...

Some more engine class placement needs to be done before its all sorted out and neat, that's the main work. Its things like transfering ownership of audio buffers to the ResourceHolder class as opposed to each buffer being owned by a seperate "player" class, and no FX or other classes being able to use that buffer.

There should be a noticable performance gain once the changes are in place, as it rips out lots of unneeded signals & slots, and replaces them with a pointerToObject - > doIt () call. Sweet.

Also I've been messing with it recently, here's a little clip of a drum beat (.wav loop) and 3 layers of guitar + some live soloing going on:
LupppGuitarJam by HarryHaaren

Patiently waiting to get MIDI looping in place... :-) -Harry

Luppp: Update Ambisonic... :-)

Hey,

Over the last week I've been implementing ambisonic support in Luppp. It didn't add up to too much work, only that JACK ports had to be named differently, the signal path adjusted somewhat (1 input, 3 outputs rather than 2 ins ,2 outs.

At the moment 2D horizontal B-Format ambisonic is supported, but implementing the 3D dimension of the first order wouldn't be too much work.. (add another channel to the process() functions.. )

The pan widget got a little haul over just to support 2D's rather than the one...


Till next, -Harry

Luppp: Update Automation

Sup,

Productivity of today: Automation. Although the widget was already done, and the hard code in place, making it actually effect the parameters in the engine was a little tricky. It now communicates with itself internally (rather than the CPU expensive OSC beforehand). I've had lots of automation tracks running concurrently and there's no problems with performance that I can see. :-)

Here we have a couple of lines, unfortunaly I didn't record the output of Luppp while it was playing the lines, would have been nice...

Also created in the last weeks, a primitive MIDI editor... Clicky in notes, the engine plays them back (sample accurate... :-)

Currently not much can be done bar insert & clear notes. But with a bit of time that will all change...




Also new: Rather than  1 - 2 - 3 - 4 on the screen, I've opted for 4 circles to appear, each a different colour for each bar. Its as easy to follow and a bit more cheerful!

Bottom left of the screenshots there's a "Stop" & "Play" button, which make jack transport start / stop. Useful to not have to switch to QJackCtl everytime.

Till next, -Harry

Luppp: Update Waveform

Hey,

Today a "ResourceHolder" was implemented, it takes all buffers / MIDI / automation data, and stores it. Nothing else. But it means there's a centralized place from which both the GUI & the engine can access the data, and allows much easier plotting of data on screen... See attached:

So there's 3 piano wavs on the top 3 loopers, some drum & bass drums on strip 3. Breaks & noises on 4, leaves some synths on 5  :-)



All in all... happy that this got done, no clean solution came to mind since the last update, so its had been while in the pipeline.
Till next, -Harry