I made a curated list of my favourite audio/music DSP things. Enjoy!
15 Likes
Thanks! Much appreciated.
Do you by any chance have a suggestion for a good time stretching algorithm? I’ve found rubberband, and it looks (or sounds) promising, but perhaps there are other open source or free ones?
I don’t know about that i’m afraid, but i heard good things about rubber band
Yes, Rubberband seems to be the only open source library for timestretching. There is of course Soundtouch, which is also free and LGPL licensed, but it’s rather basic (AFAIK it’s the same algorithm used when you speed things up in VLC Player, LOL).
Paulstretch is amazing. I have (ab)used it many times in the past to create massive cinematic pads 
Still can’t understand why someone would put Will Pirkle on their favorite list…
I have some of your reservations too, especially the pushing of RackAFX, which I doubt will help beginners in the long run, and there’s a lot of unpleasant looking code like you say in your review [edit - odd choices such as putting __stdcall, hungarian notation and UINT etc]. I have not actually used them that much since they came out a bit late in my plug-in development career unfortunately, but I think they would have helped. Come on - 2 pretty thorough books about making effects and synthesisers with C++ and absolutely loads of example projects - awesome I think. I much prefer this to for example The Audio Programming Book, which I think is a bit all over the place (the same authors have written some other books which I think are excellent BTW).
Rubberband is the only thing out there for commercial apps, but if you are on iOS or Android, the ZTX license is reasonable. The desktop license is steep!
Thanks. Sort of what I’ve found out myself. Rubberband sounds reasonable good (haven’t had the opportunity to test any better at least yet), Soundtouch does not, and paulstretch seems to be for extreme time stretching, not the 1-2 times that I’m interested in.
As someone who is fairly new to plugin development, I found Will Pirkle’s first book much more accessible than other DSP books I tried. The RackAFX tie-in is slightly irritating, but I had no problems porting his examples to Juce.
I think if one overlooks the flaws in his coding style that you describe in your review, his examples are very straightforward to follow.
As a leaping off point for a beginner I think his books are excellent. They certainly helped me!
3 Likes
Yes, but how many people realize his coding is bad? That’s the issue.
1 Like
Thanks for sharing this, Oli. I’ve always used Csound a lot, but now I’m interested in others. My understanding of C++ has also improved, and I’m thinking I can use something more direct for DSP.
I learned a lot from Miller Puckette’s book, Theory and Technique of Electronic Music, some years back. It had a lot of math, but well explained, that helped me grasp the ideas behind filters and Fourier transforms. I seem to recall most of the ideas are presented using Pd. I seldom see it mentioned, but I found it quite useful.
http://msp.ucsd.edu/