Composers Desktop Project Forum

From another post here...

QuoteThe main thing to remember with the Renoise tool is that it is simply sending terminal commands to execute CDP processes on sounds within Renoise.
To resolve your issues I suggest you first try to get the command line executables working with just the command line and outside of Renoise. If these work then the Renoise tool should also work.

The other thing to consider is that the previous issues with the environment variable are no longer an issue and this simplify's things greatly. If you only want to use the Renoise tool all you need to do is download the v7.1 executables on this page and stick them in a folder: http://www.unstablesound.net/cdp.html

When you launch the Renoise tool for the first time it will ask for the location of the executables and you can simply point this to the folder you have downloaded them to.

Hope that helps!

The main thing to remember with the Renoise tool is that it is simply sending terminal commands to execute CDP processes on sounds within Renoise.
To resolve your issues I suggest you first try to get the command line executables working with just the command line and outside of Renoise. If these work then the Renoise tool should also work.

The other thing to consider is that the previous issues with the environment variable are no longer an issue and this simplify's things greatly. If you only want to use the Renoise tool all you need to do is download the v7.1 executables on this page and stick them in a folder: http://www.unstablesound.net/cdp.html

When you launch the Renoise tool for the first time it will ask for the location of the executables and you can simply point this to the folder you have downloaded them to.

Hope that helps!

Forum works for me, however my main request would be for it to be readable for non-registered users. Being indexed by search engines would be one obvious advantage.

IMO being a closed forum is not conducive to building a community.

I can't get pvoc extract to work, running it the terminal I get the following error:


analysis/synthesis beginning
0 min  0.00 secpvoc: write error: no memory to open sndfile
ERROR: SYSTEM ERROR
ERROR: Can't write to output soundfile: no memory to open sndfile
WARNING: Can't close output sf-soundfile : can't truncate SFfile


pvoc 'anal' and 'synth' work fine so I'm guessing this is a bug with 'extract'

Anyone else have the same issue?

Sweet!!!

Have you resolved the issue with accessing audio data? On Renoise the processing speed once the data is in the Lua side is quite fast, I don't think it uses LuaJit either, I run it on 64bit Mac Osx, I think the implementation is using LuaBind.. not sure if that makes a difference..

This looks amazing! Especially now you are looking at hourglass integration.

Do you need any beta testers?

I'm presuming you have lua embedded in this now? If so, then it would be super cool if you enabled some kind of 'roll your own effects' feature. Once you have the sample data in a lua table it's quite easy to code custom effects in lua. I have this planned for the Renoise tool and have adapted bits of DSP code into lua, right now I have a biquad filter and various distortions.. also more stuff could be adapted from protoplug (http://www.osar.fr/protoplug/)..

This has been updated, the main new addition is an integrated envelope editor - See the forum post over at the Renoise Forum for more details: http://forum.renoise.com/index.php/topic/41882-new-tool-30-cdp-lua-tool/?p=352902

Agreed, looking forward to this landing

Thank you Richard and Simon for making this available, the setting of the environment variable has been a real issue for a lot of users in my experience, especially on mac, so this is a very welcome release.

A question about the mac (.mpkg) installer for the software, does this need to be run to use just the executables? I have been using the updated exe's on a fresh mac install and everything seems to be working fine so I'm not sure what I'm missing out by not running the mac installer.. I noticed on my old mac that the installer added a bunch of folders in addition to the _cdprogs folder (_cdpatch, _cdpenv, _cdpins, _userenv, _userlog) I'm not really sure what these are for, will need these for some processes?

Have you followed the installation guide available at: http://www.renoise.com/tools/cdp-interface

There are specific instructions for setting the environment variable on OS X Yosemite also detailed here: http://unstablesound.net/cdpforum/index.php?topic=49.0

Quote from: Xenakios on October 23, 2015, 01:09:15 PM
Yeah I am hoping I can use the definitions.lua file more or less as it is, so if it is updated it will still work. So far I have been able to use an unedited version of the current one. The C++ code is almost ready to be plugged into the GUI frontend code, until now it's been just a command line program to test the Lua C API and so on.

With my own frontend developments too, it sure has been a frustrating problem how the CDP program parameter ranges mentioned in the documentation don't always seem to be correct, resulting in the programs not completing their runs successfully and even crashing in some cases. Hopefully eventually the correct input parameter ranges/values can be mirrored in the frontends without having to study the actual C source codes of the CDP programs too much.

It's a bummer the multichannel programs wouldn't work in Renoise. (Is it a limitation in Renoise or your code...?) I have myself been working a lot with multichannel audio lately. I wonder if the data format could include a flag for the CDP program being multichannel instead of having the description commented out?

Yes the terminal output view has been quite useful for resolving incorrect parameter ranges, one thing I have noticed for some processes is that the range depends on some other slider settings, particularly with Pvoc process, the points setting can affect the range of some process sliders. As you say one way is to analyse the code for how these work or alternatively have some way to catch the errors or display the terminal error message for the process which usually tells you what the correct range should be.

With multichannel, it on the todo list, renoise doesn't support multichannel audio files so some splitting will be needed to put the different channels into stereo samples. I will however look at how to define multichannel processes in the definitions rather than commenting them out.

GUI looking good so far though! I like it

Yeah Djeroek has done an amazing job on compiling the definitions, really this tool wouldn't exist without his input.

Quote from: Xenakios on October 22, 2015, 09:10:52 PM
Trying to convert the Lua code into C++ started looking too messy, so I am now looking into making a C++ program that has Lua embedded and would read/use the definitions.lua file directly.

Neat! This is quite a good idea.

For some processes the range settings aren't always right as they are based on the docs, these are fixed as they are found for newer releases. Does that mean if the definitions file is updated for the renoise tool it will be compatible with your tool as well?

Anyway, really looking forward to see what you do with it

Edit: There are a number of processes definitions that are commented out as they mostly have MultiChannel outputs. The Renoise tool doesn't yet support them so they are commented out. You should be able to trace them by searching the code for comment blocks.

Thanks for the feedback everyone, it has been a lot of fun putting this together and an equal amount of credit needs to go to Djeroek from the Renoise Forums for all his work on compiling the process definitions (i'll explain further below)

Quote from: Xenakios on October 04, 2015, 03:45:14 AM
How much reusable code is in the Renoise frontend? Or is it very Renoise-centric? Just thinking about possibilities here if any of the hard work you've done could be ported over to something that doesn't require using Renoise...

I think a fair bit of it could be re-used, under the hood you have two sides to this tool, you have the code that builds the GUI, does the sample handling and puts together the terminal commands etc.

And then you have a definitions file that codifies all the CDP processes into a standard data format (using Lua tables), here's an example:


dsp["Tunevary - Replace spectral frequencies with the harmonics of specified pitch(es), uses pitch template text file"] = {
  cmds = { exe = "tunevary", mode = "tunevary", tip = "This complementary spectral program builds on and combines aspects of PITCH TUNE and FILTER VARIBANK. Thus it can tune a spectrum to the specified pitches (given that those pitches are in the analysis file, otherwise, it skips or approximates them), AND it can do so in a time-varying way. Thus the pitch template file also contains times. TUNEVARY can therefore be seen as an extension of PITCH TUNE." },
  arg1 = { name = "Input", input = "ana", tip = "Select the input sound to the process" },
  arg2 = { name = "Output", output = "ana", tip = "Select the output sound to the process" },
  arg3 = { name = "pitch_template", input = "txt", tip = "textfile containing pitch data as a list of lines, each line containing a time followed by a (possibly fractional) MIDI pitch value(s)." },
  arg4 = { name = "focus", switch = "-f", min = 0, max = 1, input = "brk", def = 1, tip = "determines the degree to which partial pitches are focused onto the template. Range: 0 to 1." },
  arg5 = { name = "clarity", switch = "-c", min = 0, max = 1, input = "brk", def = 0, tip = "determines the degree to which non-template partials are suppressed. Range: 0 to 1" },
  arg6 = { name = "trace", switch = "-t", min = 1, max = 12000, input = "brk", def = 512, tip = "specifies window-by-window the number of most prominent spectral channels to be replaced by the template pitches. (Range: 1 to number of channels)" },
  arg7 = { name = "bcut", switch = "-b", min = 0, max = 22050, input = "brk", def = 50, tip = "instructs the program to ignore any pitches below bcut, the Bass cutoff frequency given in Hz." },
}


So briefly what you can see here are tables within tables, the 'cmds' table key contains details of the exe and its mode and the args1...argsN details the command line arguments.

What the tool does is read this 'definition' and build the GUI accordingly, it can see from 'arg1' the input files are 'ana' so it will do a PVOC conversion, the tool decides what GUI elements to build based on what is contained in the 'arg..' tables.

So I specified this format and started coding the main tool and meanwhile Djeroek (who collaborated on this with me) did the laborious task of going through the CDP docs and codifying all the processes in this format (he writes a bit more about it here: https://www.facebook.com/hiekamatiek/posts/717818141606516:0)

The result is 10,000+ lines of code defining 830+ processes covering most of the CDP commands! While the GUI side is probably not that portable the data format for the CDP process definitions definitely is. I don't think it would be too much trouble to write a conversion script to convert it to whatever data format you want.

Anyway I would be happy to take you through it more detail and explain the ins and outs of the data format and the GUI building logic etc.. I really like the look of some of your reaper prototypes, particularly the node/graph approach, happy to help in any way really

This is so good, have seen lots of queries on how to get CDP running on Linux so this is going to very helpful. Nice one!

This has been under development for over a year now by me and Djeroek and I have just published it to the Renoise Tools page.
The tool and it's installation guide are available here: http://www.renoise.com/tools/cdp-interface



The tool allows you to use Renoise as a general CDP front end and workspace, this makes it quite easy to rapidly experiment with sounds and then sequence them into song arrangements.
Renoise comes with a built in sample editor and sampler so combined with this tool and CDP it becomes a sound design powerhouse. Renoise is also cross platform running on Mac, Windows and Linux. The free demo version of Renoise will work with this tool without restriction.

Key features

• A total of 829 CDP process supported
• Automatic conversion of Stereo/Mono samples for processes that only work in Stereo/Mono
• Automatic conversion of WAV/ANA inputs and outputs for PVOC processes
• Automatic conversions of input Samples to FRQ for GetPitch processes
• Built in text editor (with Load/Save) for parameters that require text inputs
• Import, edit and scale breakpoints (with Load/Save) from Renoise envelope editors
• Process descriptions and tooltips for parameters
• Terminal output displayed in Renoise to help troubleshoot processes

That's all for now, I hope some of you find this useful.

Cheers