Composers Desktop Project Forum

This is the second request for video tutorials today! As it happens, CDP has been holding its AGM all week, and the creation of video tutorials is already under active discussion and planning. We will of course announce them as soon as they are available.

This is the usual message from MacOS "Gatekeeper" for any "unsigned" application downloaded from the net.  This has been annoying CDP users since Mountain Lion. Currently the least complicated way to circumvent this is to type the following command into Terminal - this assumes Soundloom.app is placed in the /Applications folder:

xattr  -rc  /Applications/Soundloom.app

This removes Soundloom.app from the "quarantine" in which the OS puts it, and thereafter it should run as expected.

Proviso: I have yet to update to Mojave (I tend to wait a while in case there are issues), but is known to work in High Sierra.

Hello. Video is certainly something we are thinking about! can you be more specific? Is the problem with the installation of the programs, and/or of Soundloom? The latter almost always comes up against the MacOS "Gatekeeper"  system, which reports any unidentified and unsigned application (i.e. not got from the App Store) as "damaged" etc. There were many reports of general audio compatibility problems with 10.13, such as CoreAudio plugins suddenly not working, so we have so far held back on upgrading from Sierra (10.12).

I can confirm there appears to be some sort of regular buffering error (periodic single-sample errors). We are investigating. Please report which OS this is on, and an example of parameter values which generate the errors.

Strange, like many other CDP programs, works on "spectral files", i.e. those generated using pvoc (.ana file extension), not directly on PCM sound files.

This is a reply recently posted to a question on Quora: it assumes Soundloom, like all apps, is installed (as we suggest) in /Applications. Otherwise, just locate it wherever it is.

"If you notice that an app looks different than you expect on your Retina display,
try opening the app using Low Resolution mode:

    Quit the app if it's open.
    In the Finder, choose Applications from the Go menu.
    In the Applications folder that opens, click the app's icon so it's highlighted.
    Choose Get Info from the File menu.
    Place a checkmark next to "Open in Low Resolution"
    Close the window and open the app again.
"

I can't test this directly, despite having a new iMac running Sierra (21" screen, no problems with Soundloom), as it doesn't have the retina display.

According to this tcl/tk page:

https://wiki.tcl.tk/41949

it seems there are very likely problems arising from the retina display (and high-resolution displays generally). So if there is a OS option to turn retina off, hopefully that will fix things in the short term.

Sadly, not having a retina-based machine means I am unlikely to be able to write and test a revised version (even if it just means building with a newer version of tcl) - we need to find a plucky and keen tcl/tk developer who fancies taking that on.

I do not expect any problems, assuming a standard gcc toolset is installed. I built a few CDP programs as an experiment when the first R-Pi came out. The Linux project files should "just work". The new build system uses Cmake, which might need to be installed first, but the sources on Github still include my original simplistic Makefiles.

This message arises if users have the older 7.0 version (or older) of the CDP programs (which require use of the long-established environment variable CDP_SOUND_EXT). The new 7.1.0 release eliminates this requirement, so that the programs can simply be copied into place (in the _cdp/_cdprogs folder). When downloading the software from the CDP downloads page,  new users will currently need to download the full 7.0 installer package available on the right hand panel on the downloads page. They then need to replace the CDP programs themselves with those in the 7.1.0 archive linked via the main panel on that page (http://www.unstablesound.net/downloads/cdpr71mac-07-16.zip).

The creation date of the programs in this archive  (as displayed in Finder) is 31 May 2016. After copying, they may show a later date.

I agree that this is a somewhat cumbersome arrangement - with the reduced need to configure a new installation (and given the changes Apple introduce with each new version of the OS), we will be replacing the current package installer (which includes documentation, and suitable startup files and folders for Soundloom) with a single zip archive.

There are other enhancements and bug fixes in the 7.1.0 release which users will certainly want.

This will not be possible sadly. Unix pipes work on "stdio streams", e.g. when a program outputs text to the console or receives text input from a keyboard. In those cases the running output of one program ("stdout") can be piped to the input ("stdin") of the second. CDP programs on the other had work strictly with soundfiles - nominally an "offline" musique-concrete approach. An output soundfile is not in any way a "temporary" file, it is just that, the output soundfile.

Thus any third-party program or application that spawns a CDP program must both provide all the required command line arguments and wait for and check for the program to finish, before making use of the output.

reproduced here, so I can confirm this appears to be a bug. I will investigate, but will advise Trevor Wishart in case he is already working on it.

The libsndfile report seems to show that the file only extends to the end of the (large) header chunk, hence no "data" chunk. This can happen if the program aborts prematurely for some reason before writing any audio. I can't reproduce the problem here (reverb runs to completion using those arguments). Is the length of the file (as shown by the OS) what would be expected? CDP programs use a header (whether WAVE or AIFF) much larger than a typical "minimum"  header, something over 2Kbytes.

Yes, the .ana extension is required; CDP uses a fixed set of custom file formats for all its frequency domain data, each identified by its extension, e.g. .ana, .env, .pch etc. Internally they are all WAVE format files.

The reported error suggests that this is an earlier version of the program which requires the environment variable CDP_SOUND_EXT to be set (to wav). The recently updated v7.1 sources on Github have removed this requirement. You can test this by setting the environment variable directly at the console ("export CDP_SOUND_EXT=wav") and then running pvoc. If the progam then runs, you know that it is an older version. The variable is effectively obsolete these days now that all Apple machines are Intel-based.

It is all fully cross-platform (32/64bit compatible), intended that way from the outset. John Fitch updated the distro now on github after checking through and adjusting a couple of things to make sure it all builds on Linux. So if for whatever reason it is not, please let me know with as much detail as possible.

Get it in the usual way by cloning a new repository

https://github.com/ComposersDesktop/CDP7

With thanks to John ffitch for getting it all set up.

The recommended build system uses CMake, which will need to be installed separately if not already available.

Building for Windows requires the Mingw command line environment with gcc etc.