GNU Octal --> Soundframe

[David O'Toole-2]

I'd like to update everyone on the GNU Octal project and talk about
what I have been working on.

Life happens, University happens, and sometimes things get
delayed. I'm sorry to have let everyone down. But the truth is, I
needed to become a better and more experienced programmer in order to
implement my ideas for Octal.

I'd like to think I have done so in the last six years of intensive
study and practice. Sometimes one needs to sit on a mountaintop and
meditate, sometimes it takes years.

The good news:

 - There is still a need for Octal. We have a great hard-disk-recorder
   in Ardour, and a great sound editor in Snd, but I still haven't
   found a proper user interface for creating a whole album
   interactively, combining multiple techniques (jamming, recording,
   looping, layering, sampling, sequencing, stretching, processing,
   granulating) into an organic whole that can be fed into
   Ardour. Projects like freewheelin' and Pure Data are pointing in
   the right direction but I would like to do something much more
   comprehensive.

 - Octal can be much more focused and much less complex than the
   original vision. I've learned that there are already some very
   powerful and general realtime sound synthesis and processing
   engines out there; for example, the new Snd-RT language and
   CLM. I've also learned that there are already some great music
   composition and modeling tools; for example Common Music.

   These programs are better than any synthesis engine I could hope to
   write, but they need a good "workspace" UI to make them accessible
   to non-programmers, and to control/unify the various JACK-enabled
   programs that one can use in combination with them.

   The problem of Octal is therefore reduced to the problem of
   constructing a good front-end for these programs, with uniform
   method of extending this front-end so that new user interfaces can
   be created by the end-user.
   
 - Last week I started from scratch, and began writing Octal in Common
   Lisp.
 
   The bridge to Snd-RT is not yet working, as Snd-RT is bleeding-edge
   software and took some time to get running properly. It will take a
   few more days.

   But the user interface, which is the interesting part anyway, is
   pretty far along:

   http://dto.freeshell.org/notebook/ClFrame.html
   
What Octal is about today:

 - A suite of utilities to implement the above vision
 - An object-oriented audio workspace application called Soundframe
 - A mailing list to discuss ideas, development, and to share our
   musical creations

I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Octal lives!

Links:

http://dto.freeshell.org/notebook/ClFrame.html
http://dto.freeshell.org/notebook/KarmaPod.html
http://www.notam02.no/arkiv/src/snd/
http://www.notam02.no/arkiv/doc/snd-rt/



--
David O'Toole
dto@...
http://dto.freeshell.org/notebook/


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