Composers Desktop Project Forum

Hi Natasha,

yes indeed, we are very close to being able to announce Release 8 along with full packages for Mac and PC. We have had several reports of success building CDP (including R8) from source. We have made a lot of code updates recently, mostly to eliminate compiler warnings, but catching a few minor bugs as well.  At present, the Github resource is still to be regarded technically as "Beta".

With regard to existing installers (v 7.1.1), again we have had good reports of successes there on M1. Being a download and not having an official Apple certificate, the "Gatekeeper" system prevents opening, but there is a standard solution which we have documented.

I have just posted the latest beta build of the CDP programs for Mac here:

http://www.rwdobson.com/MacR8-13-03-23.zip

It is compiled for Intel machines (unfortunately CDP does not have access to an M1-based Mac), but I am assured that the new M1 "rosetta" system works as expected and all the programs will run.  Documentation preparation is at an advanced stage, but not ready for release yet. We will publish it at the same time we announce the full CDPR8 release.

Richard Dobson

The idiomatic way to do this is to use the shell scripting facilities. It is a good idea to read up on shell commands (and practice a little before committing to anything serious). Simple commands can be done directly at the prompt, but most of the time you will want to create a text file for your script. Here is an example to copy files to a named subdirectory:

#!/bin/bash
# usage  copyfiles.sh outdir
# copies wave files in current directory to same names in directory outdir
# outdir will be created if not present
# copysfx must be in system PATH

if [ -z $1 ]; then
  echo "usage: ./copyfiles.sh outdir"
  echo "outdir will be created if it does not exist."
  echo
  exit
fi

if [ $1 == "." ]; then
echo "can't copy files into same directory!"
echo
exit
fi

if [ ! -d $1 ]; then
    mkdir $1
fi

for filename in *.wav
do
   copysfx $filename $1/$filename
done

Yes, it appears the documentation has some errors - we are looking into it. The example command line is missing the all-important "transposes" data text file, and has too many parameters - the final one for Mode 1 is "spacetype". The strange error message arises because (a foible of most modern operating systems!) a number such as "30" can be a legal file name; at the stage the message appears, it has not been opened to verify it is the right sort of data file.

In that particular pvoc implementation (Mark Dolson original author decades ago), the first frame in an analysis file is all-zeroes. Other implementations may skip that, but the arithmetic is the same. In the general case, all bin phases have to start from somewhere on the circle, so to speak, and the default choice is zero, just as it tends to be for any digital oscillator. since pvoc is based on the FFT, converting phase increments to frequency, each bin has a (default) centre frequency arranged linearly from DC to Nyquist.

In theory, any other starting phase could be used; one would expect this to be the same value for all bins, but there have been suggestions to start with randomised phases. Probably less useful for pvoc in analysis mode, but often a way to avoid extreme peak amplitude values when creating an oscillator bank. The Dolson pvoc code is certainly more difficult and opaque to read than others (some clever code involved to apply overlapped windowing while avoiding all memory movements); but the payoff is that it is significantly faster than other more "straight-forward" implementations.

Thanks for this - we are indeed getting a new distribution ready, with new html documentation by Robert Fraser, and all the file names will be in lower case.

What platform is this? You will need the latest/current 7.1 download of the programs. These avoid the need to install an environment variable, which could be the source of the problem. If you are on the Mac, there was also an error in compiling the release which meant that the program "housekeep" was incorrectly named "houskeep", and will need to be renamed. Sadly I do not have Renoise, so can't help with operational issues there - you would need to refer to the author of the Renoise CDP facility.

Just to check: does "HOUSEKEEP" appear in the list of processes (under "Utilities") in the Process window? Does running a single Process (rather than an Instrument) work OK? Ostensibly, the channel extract process is failing, so no outfiles are being generated, hence the error message. These are generated by the TCL interpreter any time something unexpected happens.  I have copied your report to Trevor Wishart. I don't think this has anything to do with Mojave - it is some interaction between Soundloom and the CDP programs that is not working.  Occasionally, we find things are failing because of a file and folder permissions conflict; these can arise using third-party tools to unzip the distribution.

Please check that you have the program "housekeep" in the _cdprogs directory under  cdpr7/_cdp. That is the program used to extract channels. It looks as though it erroneously got called "houskeep" (as used on the PC version) in the installer, which among other things would mean that "HOUSEKEEP" does not appear in the list of available processes. If this is the case, just rename it to "housekeep" and all should be well. This will of course be fixed in an update to the distribution.