Composers Desktop Project Forum

As an "official" announcement may not be forthcoming on this forum, I want to tip off fellow CDP users who might not have noticed: Trevor recently posted a new version of Sound Loom on his website for both PC and Mac.

http://www.trevorwishart.co.uk/slfull.html

An unusual addition to this version of SL is the inclusion of Physical Modelling for several brass instruments based on the work of the NESS project (http://www.ness-music.eu/).  Models for other instruments are likely forthcoming.  Some of you will appreciate that the installation of the PM functionality is entirely optional--the functionality doesn't even show up in SL unless the appropriate files in the Loom Data Pack are placed in your _cdprogs folder.

Does anyone know if Sound Loom is to be released for Linux at some point?

Apart from the Sound Loom Reference in the CDP manual (HTML), you are probably already aware of the CDP workshops.

http://www.composersdesktop.com/workshops.html

While not designed to introduce Sound Loom, per se, I found the first few workshops in CDP Workshop 1 helpful in showing  me how to perform the same processes in either Sound Loom or Soundshaper when I started out.

There is also A User's Guide to the Sound Loom and CDP Sound Transformation Software (twSoundLoomGuide.pdf), which should be found in the "docs" folder of your CDP installation.  While not exactly "step by step," I felt I better grasped the program's workflow after reading this document.

Please excuse me if you have already reviewed these documents!

Welcome to CDP!  The official links to the tutorials has been the subject of a running thread on this forum.  (You are not the first to have difficulty!)

No matter, the kind administrator of this forum now hosts the tutorials here:

http://unstablesound.net/downloads/CDPWorkshop1.zip

http://unstablesound.net/downloads/CDPWorkshop2.zip

Done!  My hope is that these files will be moved to another (more reliable) location soon.

N.B.  The workshops are intended to be followed with either Sound Loom or Soundshaper.  But Soundshaper's UI has evolved a bit since the tutorial was put together, so you will probably have to hunt around a little in newer versions of the program to find some functions.  If someone else doesn't express interest in revising the Soundshaper part of these workshops, I may propose doing it myself . . .

A couple days ago, I sent you a personal message (in this forum) with URLs you could use to download the workshops.  Did you receive it?

Barring a snafu with the install, your CDP system should be complete.  However, Sound Loom tries to be reasonably "smart" about what processes it can perform successfully on the files in your Chosen Files list.  Operations that cannot be performed on the file(s) in this list will be greyed out & inaccessible to you.

For example, the Spectral Processes operate on analysis files (.ana), and cannot be applied to normal sound files (e.g., .wav or .aif).  If any of your Chosen Files are normal soundfiles, the Spectral Processes will not be available to you.  Use PVOC > Analysis to convert your sound files to analysis files first, then make these your Chosen Files to "enable" these processes.

The SYNTHESIS functions generate new sound files "from scratch" rather than operating on existing ones.  Empty your Chosen Files list first to use SYNTHESIS.

Last I checked, none of the DISTORT functions can operate on stereo or multi-channel sound files.  (And given the nature of their operation, it really does not make much sense for them to be able to do so.)  Use CHANNELS to extract a choice channel (or collapse your stereo file to a mono file) and make these your Chosen Files.

Another option might be WINE, which basically functions as a Windows application interface for X11.  You'll need X11 installed (if Mac OS X doesn't already come with it by default, these days), but it should--in principle--let you run Soundshaper side-by-side with your normal Mac applications without "virtualization" or some dual-boot scheme.

However, this is still not precisely what you want.  I don't wish to speak for Robert Fraser, but as I understand the matter, the issue has been the uncertain standing of cross-platform support for the language that SS is written in.  I'm sure "porting" the program to another language would be no joke.

As an aside, I am not a Mac user (anymore), but your perspective on Sound Loom and Soundshaper is interesting to me.  I've also found both front-ends significantly different in their approach, although I've come to respect both for their respective strengths & weaknesses.  (And it was honestly difficult for me to fully commit to just one of these two applications until fairly recently.)  But if it is Soundshaper that enables you as a creator, is it just not feasible to keep a dedicated Windows machine around for CDP?