All the information I got on Mac sound Apps

[Ben Woodeson <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear List,

Here are the responses that I got to my question about Apple Mac sound
programs. Lots of you asked for copies so here you are. Many many thanks
to those of you who sent me stuff, I didn’t know if you would want your
names on this post and guessed not. If I’m wrong I do apologise.

I included everything as I’m still trawling my way through the links and
you never know what you find etc.

Cheers,

Ben Woodeson
Artist’s web site: http://www.woodeson.co.uk
(no sound stuff, just documentation and reviews etc)
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you could try some of the programmes listed at

http://music.calarts.edu/~tre/CompMusMac/

which is a list of computer music synthesis/editing programmes - quite a

lot of them do sound synthesis and filtering.

I would recommend using Paul Russell's Synthesiser - it works for me.
And I noticed Riccardo Coen suggested C-sound to you in his reply -
there
is a port of this for the Mac, and as you'll see on the CalArts web
page,
there are some nice GUI's for it too!

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Csound works on macintosh inter alia; should work at sub 20Hz if the
playback kit can.
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I use Macs for sound synthesis and editing a lot, but mostly for
algorithmic synthesis and sonification (i.e., not music, per se). So I
don't have much to say about score editing programs, sequencing, MIDI,
etc.

In terms of synthesis on the Mac, I use CSound and SoundEdit, plus
sometimes SuperCollider. For post-synth editing, I use SoundEdit. Those
three get the job done! Steeper learning curve for CSound and
SuperCollider, but more power in the end.

I don't use them much, but some of the shareware titles have cool and
sometimes even useful functions. It is good to have a copy hanging
around
of:

D-Sound Pro (good simple synth, FM synth, lots of effects, MIDI, a
pretty
good deal at $39)

Amadeus (simple synth, editing, spectrograms, oscilloscope)

SoundApp is great for file format conversions, though the version I have

is kinda out of date.

Peak LE (though not shareware) is good for DSP and special effects on
existing audio files, but I don't use it for synthesis at all. Maybe I'm

missing something.

Same goes for SoundHack, which has simple MPEG & CD ripping tools as
well.

---
SoundEdit: www.macromedia.com
CSound: www.csound.org
SuperCollider: www.audiosynth.com

For shareware, see:
Shareware music machine: http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/

D-Sound Pro: http://www.hitsquad.com/smm/programs/D-SoundPRO_Japan/

SoundHack: www.soundhack.com

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You can try the PowerSynthesiser package which I developed a few
years ago <http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/Synthesiser/> - it should be
good for anything from DC upwards. However I'm not sure what the LF
response of the Mac audio output stage might be (it may be different
for different models). You should probably do some quick tests with a
'scope to see where it rolls off.

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Here is some information, mostly from the
website:http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~theo/audio.html
about the MAX graphical environment.

Key points: Within MAX the audio DSP stuff is called MSP
jMAX is a newer IRCAM version of max that includes audio DSP
The Audio DSP in both MSP and jMAX are based upon another package called

Pd.
Pd will run on Mac Linux, but the setup of the audio drivers is than a
long
iterative process...

MSP is a set of extensions to the MAX environment that lets you do
real-time synthesis and signal processing with a Mac. Just as Max is a
tool set for MIDI and multimedia, MSP is a tool set for audio,
consisting
of objects that synthesize, process, analyze, delay, and generally mess
around with audio signals in real-time. MSP is distributed by
Cycling'74.
<http://www.cycling74.com/>


Not presently for Mac but a useful reource if you use Max/MSP:
jMax is a recent real-time DSP environment developped at IRCAM for
replacing the old ISPW (based on NeXT computers with specialized DSP
boards) and FTS formely used by Forum members on Silicon Graphics. jMax
is purely software based and portable to different platforms. Its guts
are plain c++, and its interface is written in Java. It is currently
available for SGI and PC Linux.
<http://www.ircam.fr/jmax>

Also look into the use of MATLAB for mac. The audio toolboxes are pretty

comprehensive.

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