RECORDER-EDITORS:
Soundhack: Soundhack is a very
cool shareware program that allows you to record audio, import audio from
a CD, analyze sound-files with a DFT or a sonogram, convert between sound-file
types with gain scaling and sample rate conversion, and perform many strange
and wonderful sound transforms on the audio: phase vocoding,
varispeed, binaural filter, soundfile convolution, ring modulation, spectral
mutation and spectral dynamics processing. Soundhack reads and writes
Sound Designer II, AIFF, AIFC, BICSF, DSP Designer, WAV, SND, AU, TEXT
and raw soundfiles. This is arguably the most useful program in Studio
E outside of Pro Tools/Sound Designer and Opcode Vision.
Browse the manual.
Only one caveat: processing is slow.
Sound Designer: Sound Designer allows stereo recording and wave-form editing. It is part of the Digidesign package, and is often used when you don't need the vast mixing and routing power of Pro-Tools. Waveforms can be transformed through: sample-rate conversion, EQ, compression/expansion/gating, independent time-stretching and pitch-shifting, noise reduction and redrawing of the waveform with the mouse. Sound-file regions can be arranged into playlists, and then imported into Pro Tools, for a very efficient form of cutting and pasting.
SoundEffects: A shareware visual sound recorder and editor with most of the standard effects and operations on user-defined regions supported: fades, normalization, reversal, reverb, noise, etc.... Similar to CoolEdit for PCs or the Sound Designer II program on this Mac. Unique features include choice of FIR/IIR frequency filters, granular synth, robotize, and waveform smoothing.
Alchemy: You can't do as much in the way of fancy effects with Alchemy. It's actually meant for sample modification and looping, and it differs from the above programs in that it allows you to store, edit, and loop sounds which can be MIDI-triggered by an external sampler or sound-module. Most people would record or load their sounds directly into the Emu E-IV sampler, which has adequate resources for sample editing, but this gives you another choice.
Peak: Yet another 2-track recorder with wave-form editing and DSP transforms, put out by BIAS . It uses the Digidesign DAE recording engine, and the plug-in transforms are very respectable. Peak supports lots of samplers, and includes some nice functions for automated looping based on the audio file (ie. it automatically finds the beat). Unfortunately, it doesn't support our sampler - the Emu E-IV.
TRANSFORMERS:
LemurPro: Sound analysis and synthesis tool developed by the CERL Sound Group at University of Illinois School of Music. No manual is available at CCRMA, instead see the Lemur web documentation . Lemur translates between AIFF files and Lemur files by using short-time Fourier spectra tracking. Lemur files can be manipulated to achieve independent time and frequency scaling that is the best you're going to get out of shareware, including the ability to have time-variant scaling -- gradual tempo change w/out pitch change, or vice versa (Sonic Foundry's ACID program is the premier commerical program for high quality time-variant pitch/tempo scaling that requires no user knowledge of DSP, if you want to spend the money.)
P.A.S.T.:
Chris Langmead's timbral morphing tool for Lemur files. Upside:
tons of parameters, fast calculation. Downside: You can't audition
the sounds in PAST, you have to save them and then open them up again in
Lemur. Note -- Soundhack and LemurPro
both perform timbral morphing as well. LemurPro's morphing merely
averages values across both samples, however, while PAST interpolates over
time from one set of spectral parameters to another.
Disc-to-Disk: This program lets
you import audio from a CD in a variety of sound-file formats:
SND, AIFF, Quicktime movie, Sound Designer II and WAV. With the exception
of the Quicktime format, Soundhack can achieve the same goal.
SOUND-PLAYERS:
SoundApp Fat: A freeware sound-player
and converter. This program only converts and writes to the same
major file formats as Disc-to-Disk and Soundhack: AIFF, SND, AU,
WAV, Sound Designer and Quicktime. ***It plays EVERY format you can
imagine, and some you can't -- check
out this list! (scroll down the target page a bit). SoundApp
also supports play lists.
SYNTHESIS AND SEQUENCING:
CSound: This is a very broad sound synthesis and sequencing engine, developed at MIT Media lab in the 80's. It's features are quite similar to CLM and Stella, and it includes a fairly comprehensive tutorial. Ideal for Lisp-haters.
CornBucket: A granular synthesis
program for generating a CSound score. Simple and powerful.
Source code is included for additional education in granular synth.
Note: You won't hear anything, this just generates a series of notes
to be played by CSound.