From: David Plans Casal Date: 2005-03-22T20:12:21+09:00 Subject: Re: FMOD or other sound libraries...anyone? Hi Matju, On 22 Mar 2005, at 08:41, Mathieu Bouchard wrote: > On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, David Casal wrote: > >> I'm looking for a good Ruby sound library... > > I am maintainer for the Ruby bindings to PureData, which is a realtime > visual programming language for audio. I am also the author of a video > plugin for PureData, and actually those things are bundled together > under > the name GridFlow. The world's so small. Met you on IRC last saturday ;-) (nick: pland) > I use GridFlow for interactive setups in art galleries, museums, and > music > shows, under contract with local artists (mostly in Montr�al and > Ottawa/Gatineau). I'm doing that stuff part-time while struggling with > a > degree (the degree is over now, so I'm going to do this full-time now, > hopefully) Does this mean that Ruby-PD bindings might get deeper (audio buffer access?), if you have time? > It would be cool to have more elaborate bindings because the ones I > have > coded are rather minimal (that is, only what I need to have for the > video > plugin). In the future it would be cool to be able to have complete > access to PureData objects, in the same way that the Python bindings to > PureData can. Especially missing are ways to access audio buffers. I > think > it wouldn't be that difficult to implement, but I haven't needed them > yet. Ah! Ok I understand now. In my case, because of my music background and the fact I wanted to learn Ruby, I thought it would be great to be able to -hear- my study of Ruby, if you see what I mean. So, what I was after was a way to exemplify concepts from the second edition of the Pickaxe, in sound. I played with PureData during my degree, and I guess having access to PD objects from Ruby would be as close as I get to heaven! ;-) But I suppose I need to find an intermediate solution for now... > What do you think about it? Is it overkill for your needs? What do you > want to achieve with the audio library? So, see above, but here's a summary : I think Gridflow is an amazing idea and project (got some osx compilation trouble I'll address ex-list), and would love to start learning it. But browsing the pd flow ruby examples in there got me kinda lost. Firstly because I couldn't run it (compilation), but also because I didn't quite get how PD would pick Gridflow up and viceversa (other than -lib) What I'm looking for, I guess, is the ability to play with sampled sound for now (similar to Cocoa's NSSound, but a bit deeper), in a way that allows me to explore ruby by ear. So simple sample loading, playing, buffering, maybe some DSP...perhaps some MIDI (though I see midilib)...like I said, PDRuby would be of course ideal, but the basics through pure Ruby and Gridflow would be even better right now, since I'm a complete n00b to Ruby. Is that too vague? > PS: The big problem with audio and Ruby, though, is that the garbage > collector takes too much CPU in one chunk, so that low-latency audio > just > fails horribly. For ordinary audio needs that's not really a problem > unless the computer is slow, but many people want low-latency so that > they > can replace their expensive and unflexible guitar pedals by something > extremely versatile, the computer. I see. Of course. Well I aim to get to a point where I can do that too. And so, I -will- need a low-latency, probably C-implemented (like PD) engine behind me, and I guess I see Ruby as the higher-level, 'thinking' language for composition, and pedal-making. My guess is you do too? What can I do to help? I'm studying the Pickaxe now, and I'll download tarball of Gridflow (tried CVS unsuccessfully) and try on OSX (10.3.8)...is there a short summary of how to get GF and PD talking anywhere (other than website docs?) Thanks for you reply, Matju, I look forward to working in Gridflow. Cheers, David