I remember remarking to an audio plug-in developer at GDC earlier this year that for a plugin to be widely adopted amongst working professionals (especially those in the film post-production community) I felt that before anything else, it had to save the user time. Original ideas, new workflows and cool sounds are all well and good, but if it extends an already complex and … [Read more...]
Making a Music System – Part 2
Playing samples straight through will get us there, but it sounds so much nicer if we have options to shape the sounds. A good first step is volume envelopes. In this lesson, we’ll make an attack-sustain-release (ASR) envelope and modify our sampler to use it to modulate the volume. … [Read more...]
Making a Music System – Part 1
Games and other interactive media put us in faraway worlds with unique characters, let us touch them, and delight us by showing us they know we’re there. In addition to visuals, sound effects, and gameplay, we have the unique opportunity to let people interact with the music. In this five-part, weekly tutorial series, we'll go step by step through the process of making an … [Read more...]
Time And Psychoacoustics
When designing audio we are often thinking of time across a large variety of units: samples, milliseconds, frames, minutes, hours and more. This article is inspired by a conversation I had with Andy Farnell about a year ago at a pub in Edinburgh, right before a sound design symposium, where we discussed about time and the role it plays when it comes to designing audio. Like … [Read more...]
Interview – Peter Brinkmann & libpd
Pure Data (Pd) is one of the most powerful and commonly used open source softwares for music and sound creation. Spearheaded by Miller Puckette, it is completely free. About three years ago libpd was released – a library of Pd Vanilla (the basic version of Pd) that makes it possible to run Pd pretty much anywhere. Since then there have been an explosion of applications for PC, … [Read more...]
Thanks to Our April Guest Contributors
Well, the flood gates certainly opened up at the end of the month...didn't they? We've got a lot of people to thank for their guest contributions to April's theme (and a few welcomed off-topic contributions). So, I'm going to get right to it! A hearty "Thank You" goes out to... Andreas Jonnson - Designing Ambiences in Max/MSP Aurelien Folie and David Sonnenschein - 3 … [Read more...]
A Tremolo AU plugin with Max
Last week I came across a post on the Cycling '74 Wiki about exporting gen~ code into an AU plugin. It looked too simple a process to be true, so I began investigating. After a few hours of work (and some help from the C74 forums because I stumbled across a bug) I managed to get a simple distortion plugin working. The whole process is actually quite simple, after you spend a … [Read more...]