I wrote a bit of music software

gonchong · Post by **gonchong** » Fri Sep 06, 2013 11:34 am

Hey all, Longtime lurker here with a first post.
I thought I'd put this here as most of you are music makers as well as fans, and might be interested in playing around with music software.
I've been kicking around developing a program in the odd spare hour for a few years now and thought it might be of interest to the outside world. It started off as a windchime simulator, but mutated along the way when i tried running beats through it. It could fall under the banner of "generative". It's certainly random. Basically it's sample based (no synthesis yet). You chuck packs (folders) of samples at it. Each pack is an "instrument". You can then tweak the settings for each instrument and let it play it's thing - there is no sequencing, so you can have some interesting noises up and running pretty quick.
I've put a soundcloud demo here with a few different moods (slightly BOCish percussion, and one bit that's more On Land than Bloom) -

Everything here is un-sequenced and hands-off, the tracks could have run forever.

If there's any interest I'll upload the program (Windows only). I have loads of new ideas for it every day, but need to stop fiddling with it and get some feedback

WeHadNormality · Post by **WeHadNormality** » Fri Sep 06, 2013 11:41 am

Hello gonchong, this certainly sounds interesting. I'd quite like to have a play with it.

gonchong · Post by **gonchong** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 7:59 am

Thanks, I'll get together a downloadable version. It requires .net framework 4 and DirectX(directsound) to be installed. It's kind of hacky at the minute but I'm planning on upgrading it to a better sound engine.

Negamuse · Post by **Negamuse** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 9:26 am

Sounds interesting! Gongchong how easy did you find the directsound stuff to do? I've been writing some audio stuff as well but I haven't got round to directsound yet, it just dumps everything straight out to disk as WAVs. (Which is annoying, cos it means none of it's real-time)

Guido · Post by **Guido** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 1:07 pm

MrMessiah wrote:Sounds interesting! Gongchong how easy did you find the directsound stuff to do? I've been writing some audio stuff as well but I haven't got round to directsound yet, it just dumps everything straight out to disk as WAVs. (Which is annoying, cos it means none of it's real-time)

Personally I use SDL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_DirectMedia_Layer) for audio, it's quite easy, and portable.

gonchong · Post by **gonchong** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 1:35 pm

MrMessiah wrote:Sounds interesting! Gongchong how easy did you find the directsound stuff to do?

It's fairly straightforward. This program just preloads loads of secondary sound buffers and then sends them off to the system which mixes them in realtime. Unfortunately the drawback of not mixing the sounds myself is that I don't have a facility to save the output. I have to do it outside the program via
Audacity and setting the soundcard to 'record what u hear'.
The program is a bit of a proof-of-concept hack, and if development continues I'd like to look at other sound api options (such as SDL, mentioned below).

gonchong · Post by **gonchong** » Sat Sep 07, 2013 3:39 pm

DV06 Version 0.01 (alpha)
http://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/download/DV06.zip
70Mb (it's big because of sample folders)

No installer. Unzip somewhere and run DV06.exe. It requires MS .net framework 4 and directX. Demo tracks are in the 'Demos' subfolder. Be sure to save any other work on your PC as it did bluescreen once on my old machine (a long time ago, possibly working the old sound card too hard).
Any feedback welcome

Have fun!

gonchong · Post by **gonchong** » Thu Sep 12, 2013 8:52 am

Did anyone get round to trying it? (I hope it worked!)

WeHadNormality · Post by **WeHadNormality** » Thu Sep 12, 2013 12:06 pm

gonchong wrote:Did anyone get round to trying it? (I hope it worked!)

Had a few plays now. It's running fine, no glitches or crashes so far. Thanks a lot. Really good fun and can get some interesting patterns from it. Haven't recorded any stuff yet but think it'll be great to use to kick start some ideas when stuck I'm for inspiration. Recording my friend reading a poem tonight or tomorrow then chopping all the words up separately and loading it into this to see what happens.

circleofthesun · Post by **circleofthesun** » Sat Sep 14, 2013 2:49 am

I'm gonna dl this throw in a TR808 sample pack and see if I can't get some cool Autechre-ish sounds.

gonchong · Post by **gonchong** » Sat Sep 14, 2013 9:12 am

Hope everyone finds it ok!
There are some 808 packs in the zip provided. Instruments are classed as 'tuned' by their file names. ie c#.wav or d1.wav. I need to get together some documentation!

The Telepathic Kid · Post by **The Telepathic Kid** » Sat Sep 14, 2013 1:22 pm

I can make a lot of mess, but that's it

2020k · Post by **2020k** » Sat Sep 14, 2013 4:57 pm

Windows only.