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The Psychosynth project announces its brand new web site: http://www.suicidesoft.com/psychosynth, hosted in our own site so we’ll have more control than in the old wordpress.com page. And it uses Dokuwiki which is very elegant and versatile. Those who follow us on the RSS don not forget to update it to the new url.
First of all lets comment the kind offer of shaker08, who is going to create loops and samples to distribute with Psychosynth and that will serve to test the sampler, which will be implemented next week. Take a look at his MySpace to listen to some good minimal techno 🙂
On the other hand, despite being almost ill because of the continous temperature oscillations and having spent a quite sabbatical weekend, this week two important features have been written.
The first one makes the program more visually attractive but also more useful. It now shows the signal going through a connection in real time. This lets us make a clearer idea of what is going on in the sound synthesis. By now, as usally audio signals are much faster than control signals, we show the las 0.05 seconds of the signal for audio, and a second for control signals, but it will be configurable in the future. I am considering that, as audio signals are quite fast, it may be convenient to implement a pitch detector to adjust the temporal frame displayed to a multiply of the wave period, so we’d get a better visualization normally.
This also implies that a generic mechanism to observe the audio signals from the client code have been added, which may permit the creation of beat detectors to control light effects or any other interesting visualization.
At last I have finished playing with autotools and cleaning up the package. I have just uploaded the first alpha version of Psychosynth and you can download it here: psychosynth-0.0.1.tar.gz. This package will install the library libpsynth and the clients psynth3d and psynth, of which you may find further information in the updated about page. I would thank you a lot if you tried the program and report any bugs you find, preferrably in the forge’s bug-tracker.
I hope to be able to go back to the funny part of the job.
My friend Leynar had the nice gesture to record a video showing two Psychosynths working over a network. We can watch it in this post of his blog. In the video he also plays a little with LFO’s. I think that the video is quite beautiful 🙂
I’ll also comment the development news. As I promised I have already written the system to store configuration settings, but it still lacks a window to edit these on the 3D interface and finish tuning the synthesis systems so we can change parameters such as the sample rate or the buffer size without having to restart the session. Suddenly I am quite busy with things appart from the project, but I will try to find a gap to finish this before the next week starts.
On the other hand, improvements don’t finish there. I have broke the plan a little bit to work into an arduous task that I have been postponing a lot of time: separate the library code and the applications and create classes to ease the creation of Psychosynth apps. Also, now both int library and application code dependencies are not compulsory, so now the are optional. For example, you can compile without liblo support if you don not need network communication or lack jack if you are not an advanced user. It is a boring task but fighting with autotools and refactoring have been worth it.
Now, looking forward to the future, I am starting to consider starting to write LADSPA plugins support and doing some important changes in the core. I will keep you informed.
First I would like to apologize for not updating the blog for a long time, and not having uploaded the video that I promised a month ago. The truth is that technical issues impeded the recording and the blog update was delayed and, when I thought I would be able to do it, my teachers burst in with an ambush of projects and then the fateful exams arrived. Luckly, the exams have gone quite well wich is a small injection of morale to work hard in the next weeks.
Actually, the lack of activity in the web does not mean that there were no significant news. Now there are LFO’s and a variety of filters, which allow a richer play with the sound, which can be generated with new wave forms and a ring modulator has been added for both audio and control signals. Also, objects can be deactivated without deleting them just by clicking on their connection. There is a multilevel and hierarchical logging system with multiple output. And the generated sound can be recorded into wav files. I have also made important modifications in the objects system to give it more versatility and will allow us to write a wider variety of synthesis objects. I have also made a quite synthetic diagram of the architecture of the program which can be viewed at the documentation section of the forge. And probably there are more things not included in this list.
At last there is a working version of the network system, which is based on OSC over UDP.
With this serveral synthesizers can connect each other through a server to sync their state. If the network latency allows it -by using UDP we’ll get low latencies usually- we’ll be able to perform collaborative music from different places 🙂
At christmas’ end I’ll give you a new vide showing this and other improvements that are to come. ¡Happy holidays!
Jack support is a very important feature to allow the communication with other audio applications, and many people have expressed their wish to see it in Psychosynth. It is now on the SVN now.
The network system is going forward too, but I’m having difficulties to find free time to expend on this.
After a week of silence, I have just published a video wich reveals the numerous improvements that has been written in these days of frenetic coding. By comparing with older videos you can check the sustancial changes that have been made, such as:
- The object visualization and management code has been rewritten and it has been connected with the existing synthesis code, by adding elements to visualize and manipulate the object parámeters both in an abstract reactable-alike manner and by directly entering the actual values.
- Part of the code in the dynamic patcher have been redesigned and some bugs have been solved in this module.
- The camara control have been improved.
- The visual theme have been improved and there are new texturized models for the objects.
- A new argument parser module have been written, despite not being used yet.
All these changes are already on the SVN repository, where you can follow the development until there is a mature version ready. In the downloads section you can find instructions on how to try it.
Now I’ll spend some days in other things but later we’ll go back with the proyect. The next task is the reimplementation of the network module, wich will substitute the existing prototype by new code based on OSC.
PS: In the video the sound is delayed at some places and there are some lags. This is the sceencasting program’s blame, the synthetizer runs fluently.
The project has been accepted in the spanish free software contest II Concurso Universitario de Software Libre which tries to promote the free software development among university students.
Because of this, I won’t update the savannah CVS repository until the competition ends, on April 7th. All the development will be done at the contest’s forge. I have just uploaded to its SVN repository all the old code that you can find at Savannah with some improvements done in October.
I find that this contest is a very motivating experience that will boost the development of the project. Along this week I will upload more information about the development roadmap and the design of the internals of the project.
Psychosynth 