FreeADSP 0.0.2 review

FreeADSP stands for Free Audio Digital Signals Processor and is a free audio-oriented real-time DSP software

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Stefano D'Angelo

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FreeADSP stands for Free Audio Digital Signals Processor and is a free audio-oriented real-time DSP software. What it does is taking a signal as input, transform it through arbitrary-disposed 'modules', and then putting the result back to some output (that is, for example, the same thing that regular guitar stomp boxes do).

What are these 'modules'?

Unlike similar applications which are designed to use only one or two kinds of audio computational plugins, FreeADSP is capable of putting to work everything that could be used to do a computation (for example a circuital representation, a mathematical formula or a neural net). This is possible because FreeADSP uses external 'module loader plugins' which know how to make things work properly.

So, what can this program do?

The main purpose of this software is processing sounds at real-time. While there are already a lot of packages around that can do it, often with some sensible limitation, FreeADSP aims at being THE program of real-time sound processing. To achive this goal its design is extremely modular, and this is what makes it capable of doing unbelivable things, at least theorically.

As said before, the possibility of using external plugins to load other stuff to process data means the possibility of using potentially everything that can do a computation, from well-known LADSPA, DSSI or VST/VSTi plugins to neural nets, also simultaneously, and in an extremely clean fashion.

The whole I/O and user interface parts are handled by external plugins too. This means again a lot more flexibility and also easier portability and integration on different OSes and/or hardware architectures (also thanks to FreeADSP's high configurability)! Furthermore an user could easily switch user interface without having to put the program and his work into the trash can.

The I/O is handled in such a generic way that one can use every kind of input or signal to interact either with modules (for example, one could use a 'breath control' to manipulate the output volume of a fretless bass, obtaining a wind instrument-like feel) or with FreeADSP itself (start/stop processing, etc.)

Last but no least, FreeADSP also lets you manage collections of presets, eventually organised into banks and record what you play at each stage of processing.

Requirements:
GNU Readline
ALSA driver