Composers Desktop Project Forum

Thanks that works!

I have the same problem but not with XTRA-LEGACY-WAVESETS-CYCL FRACTALS. Some solution?

Thanks for trying it out.

I did manage to get the Distort/Fractal to work on the new SoundThread GUI, but there seems to be alot more parameters on Soundshaper for it, so I still would like to try it there as well.

Just saying that tried the above and also got errors.

Hello, I have been quite into the different CDP processes with Soundshaper lately, but I haven't been able to get the fractal processes to work.

Both Distortion/Fractal and Spectral/Pitch/Fractal give errors. Basically it's saying that it's either missing a wav file or an ana file to process from the temp folder and no matter what I try seem to fix that. First I thought it was something to do with txt / brk file for the transpose, but it doesn't seem to be connected to that.

Any ideas to fix this?

Re 16/32 bit file outputs:  as it happens, none of the main CDP programs supports command flags to nominate an output format. This is mostly for historical reasons: the CDP system was conceived first for the Atari ST with a custom filing system "(sfsys") with explicit options to read/write either 16bit int samples or 32bit floats. At that time the very concept of a 24bit file barely existed.

Fast forward to Windows media formats, and to begin with, again, only 16bit audio was supported by the API (plus legacy 8-bit formats). In a short while, Microsoft added a new format flag option in the header to define 32bit floats (so-called "type-3" file). CDP always had basic tools to convert between 16/32 bit files. More recently, to give access by users to high-resolution formats, we added the possibility to request a floats output by prefixing the output sound file name with "-f". This is supported in Soundloom, and, I assume, Soundshaper.

As Robert indicated, CDP programs read the input file format (e.g. 24bits, but there are others) and use that to set the output format; thus you can give a 24bit file to a program and it will output in the same format. To create such an input file (from 16bit/floats etc), you will need to use what is now the "workhorse" CDP tool "copysfx" to  generate whichever sample and channel format you want from quite a long list.

It is certainly a reasonable idea these days, with GB of disk space to play with, to work entirely with 32bit floats sound files (CDP programs themselves always use floats for internal processing). So long as the file is in the strictly correct "WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE" file format (which CDP programs ensure), native Windows media players (relying on the Windows Media API) will play it on whatever hardware is available, making sample conversions if necessary. Third-party apps are typically more forgiving.  You would then only convert your final master output file to, say, 24bits, for distribution.

So the modern choice is between working with 24bit or 32bit files. In most cases there will be no audible difference, and of course 24bit files will be that much shorter than 32bit files. There is however one rather cool aspect of the 32bit floats file format (as defined by Microsoft), which is supported by CDP programs. Being a floating-point format, the nominal sample range is +- 1.0 (in audio terms, 0dBFS). But there is a lot of headroom available, which matters most with filtering and some mixing operations where that limit can easily be exceeded. With the integer formats the inevitable result is clipping. However with 32bit floats there is no need for that clipping, and the PEAK sample value is also recorded in the file header (these days using a so-called "PEAK Chunk" added to the header, though CDP has always had its own non-portable ways of doing this).

The upshot of all that is that, for example, you can generate a floats output with over-range samples, and the CDP play program "paplay" (I must declare an interest: I wrote it) will automatically apply a scale factor to play the file without clipping.

The merits or otherwise of various soundfile formats is not something I can usefully comment on, other than to say more bits are more accurate (give a wider dynamic range). I'll pass this question to Richard Dobson, who may have a thought or two on the matter.

I agree with you, but this is a matter for CDP, not Soundshaper, which uses the CDP program copysfx when loading source files for internal use. copysfx supports a lot of formats (look it up), but not mp3 or flac. Having said that, the BASS audio library I use does support both mp3 and flac, so it might be possible in a future release to use that to convert to some other internal format that CDP could use.

Hi
I see that you only can import wav and aiff formats.
It would be very convenient if you could also import formats like mp3 and flac.

Hi Robert
It's a pleasure to read your comments, you always learn something new and interesting.
They say the best quality is 32 bit but I guess that's if you create an original wav from synth-synthesis-wave. What I'm not clear is when you import in soundshaper samples of different format, 16 or 24 bits, which is the best quality to export it, if you respect its original bits or transform them (with soundshaper processes) and export them as 32 bits?
* For now, the workaround is probably to change the sound output in Windows settings to the card you want to use, and the WaveMapper will use that.
- Ok, Thanks for the suggestion, I will try to see if it detects it this way.