Composers Desktop Project Forum

To add a little more to this important investigation:

The reference to "PUA..." in the Sophos instance is explained by them here:

https://support.sophos.com/support/s/article/KBA-000004926?language=en_US

I find it interesting (not least as I used Sophos for all AV checking when I had a free account through Bath University; I now use McAfee) that they refer to their "Deep Learning" system. This is of course the modern AI approach, which is by its nature statistical, rather than the "conventional" AV paradigm of comparing against a database of known threats. On that page "PUA" means "Potentially Unwanted Application" (especially in the context of a "business netowrk") - which looks to me remarkably like the Gatekeeper system on the Mac for checking uncertificated downloads - and for which we document a standard workaround.

We are of course continuing to look at this, and will report here as and when.

Thanks for this analysis. We'll try to follow these up. Two thoughts though: (1) I've not heard of any of the programs that found fault with the files - all the well-known anti-virus packages seem to pass them. (2) it's hard to believe that the Lite zip would be seen as more malicious than the full one, though, given that it has far fewer files - it's exactly the same as Full less the CDP Documentation, so that doesn't add up somehow.

Hi,
It's always better to be safe than sorry. I'll just add that if by any change there IS a virus in my machine, it's certainly not done any damage so far. Not to my files anyway. Also, I develop Soundshaper on a separate PC that is never connected to the internet, to keep it as clean as I can.

Robert

The Windows installer has been virus-checked by Trend Micro anti-virus and that shows up no threats; the same applies to the various Soundshaper downloads on my site. As you'll appreciate, it's not practical to install more than one virus checker, but I'd be glad if other users were to flag up any threats their particular anti-virus software has detected, so that these can be followed up.  It is marginally possible that there could be a virus, but I'm inclined to suspect this is a false positive. When I run a new copy of Soundshaper on Win10, Trend immediately thinks it's found a threat, because the program is deleting files - of course it is, they're temporary soundfiles!

Ultimately, the user must make up their own mind about the safety or otherwise of this software which is supplied "as is". There's certainly no intention to spread viruses.

Getting to know CDP, part 2:
I'm currently reading some of the entries in the full command reference documentation. In "cpvocman.htm" (i.e. the entry entitled "CDP PVOC Functions"), the description of several commands begins with statements like the following:
"The flags mentioned refer to Old Usage pre-Release 4. The documentation often refers to the -N flag (points) and the -W flag (overlap)."
Or:
"The flags mentioned (-W, -C) refer to Old Usage pre-Release 4."
Later, there's a heading which says:
"The Phase Vocoder flags – with CDP parameter names (since Release 4) in parentheses"
Honestly, I'm confused. Does that mean that it describes the usage of these commands for releases older than 4? If so, where am I supposed to find the description of their usage in newer versions?

Next, it keeps talking about pairs of frequencies and amplitudes. Do they really mean frequencies? Are they sure they didn't mean to say "phase shifts and amplitudes"? Aren't the specific frequencies implied from the chosen sample rate and FFT size? I've read the entire webpage from top to bottom and it still seems to me that it should actually be "phase shifts and amplitudes".