Subject: All the information I got on Mac sound Apps From: Ben Woodeson <ben(at)woodeson.co.uk> Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 15:40:45 +0000Dear 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=92t know if you would want your names on this post and guessed not. If I=92m wrong I do apologise. I included everything as I=92m still trawling my way through the links an= d you never know what you find etc. Cheers, Ben Woodeson Artist=92s web site: http://www.woodeson.co.uk (no sound stuff, just documentation and reviews etc) ___________________________________________________________________ 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! ___________________________________________________________________ Csound works on macintosh inter alia; should work at sub 20Hz if the playback kit can. ___________________________________________________________________ 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editing, spectrograms, oscilloscope) SoundApp is great for file format conversions, though the version I have is kinda out of date.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 ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________