Songs 0.3 review
DownloadSongs is a graphical tool to record and mix audio files
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Songs is a graphical tool to record and mix audio files. It supports an infinite number of tracks, huge audio files, and various effects.
One important motivation for Songs was the need of a recording tool under Linux. There are some already existing (see the links below), but these are too complex, too huge, eat too much memory and resources. Small machines can be used to record and mix audio files, even with a graphical interface. Songs is trying to prove it.
The recording is done directly to disk, so that with small machines, whithout much memory you can still record.
There is a full duplex mode, but full duplex is not very well handled with OSS. You don't really know if your two streams of samples are synchronized or not, and the interface provided by OSS does not help much with that. So, currently, take the full duplex mode as is. You probably will need to move by hand audio tracks to let them be synchronized.
Here are some key features of "Songs":
Unlimited number of tracks.
Supports WAV files (mono, stereo). Only 44.1 KHz, 16 bits files are supported, because Songs was born mainly to help me create music I could store on audio digital compact disks.
Supports raw float files (mono, stereo). Very useful when you are mixing and that you eat too much resources. Simply put in a new file your current mix, and use this new file instead of several ones. Using float numbers gives more precision of the intermediary mixing.
Several effects (currently not that much, but it is planned).
Not too much memory used. All the audio files are mapped directly into the memory, so that the Linux kernel can swap them very easily. It means that if your files can exist on your disk, any size they are, they can be used with Songs (with a soft limitation of virtual memory space, which depends on your setup, and a hard limitation of 2 GB, because of the use of signed integers, which currently are 32 bits numbers).
Use of gtk 2.0, for the good and the bad. The good is that the interface was done quickly. The bad is that the gtk documentation is far from perfect, that gtk is not bug free, that I may use it the wrong way sometimes and that it may change in the future, forcing Songs to be changed (and what if the Songs authors don't feel the need to do so, for example by lack of time?).
What's New in This Release:
sc1.c sc1_gui.c:
New files, ripping a compressor from sc1_1425 coming from swh-plugins-0.4.11.tar.gz (see http://plugin.org.uk/).The compressor was buggy, sometimes in rms_env_process
r->sum was negative, leading to NaN for the sqrt stuff.
pan/vol/pos.c: Checking return value of malloc (no, it was not done, shame !).
various files: Fixing a realloc misusing (doing realloc(size+=32) then size+=32, which finally means size+=64 but only allocing size+32 stuff, weirdy to find).
help_gui.c: The "About" stuff only appeared once, fixing it.
various files: Fixing bugs those last days, forgot to feed this Changelog.
Songs 0.3 keywords