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Monthly Archives: March 2008
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.
