Can ChucK manipulate preexisting soundfiles?

Plankhead · Joined: Apr 24, 2008 Posts: 14 Location: Long Island

I think ChucK is great from my first impression, seems very powerful. The problem is, I've got an ambitious idea that requires not only synthesizing of sound files with ChucK scripts, but also manipulation of preexisting sounds in wav, mp3, ogg, etc. Can ChucK do this? If not, will it ever?

Inventor

kijjaz · Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 11:34 pm Post subject:

Yes, I agree also.
at first, you might want to play with SndBuf for input and WvOut for output..
and you can design the algorithm to do with SndBuf then output to WvOut.

I still haven't been doing this, i'll go to study more about SndBuf.

Kassen · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 1:37 am Post subject:

...but mp3 and ogg won't work, I don't think any compressed format is supported.

You'd have to convert them in a editor (Audacity is free) aside from that; yes, that will work.

Plankhead · Joined: Apr 24, 2008 Posts: 14 Location: Long Island

Great to hear WAV files are supported.

Once I get more proficient with ChucK, though, I'm interested in actually doing stuff with it on the web, where WAV files can...take a while. So at the very least, support for an open source format like OGG would be wonderful.

Any idea whether this is on the to-do list for ChucK?

EDIT: I just checked and saw it was on the requested features list in the Wiki.

Kassen · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 5:17 am Post subject:

Yes, OGG would probably be the first choice here; it's open and it's free. Using MP3 might conflict with some Linux package repositories and I think getting proper (up to date) packages makes more sense then supporting MP3 but we could debate that.

The thing with compressed formats is that you can't really work with them directly; I don't think any program does. What happens is that the compressed music is decoded (to Wav or AIFF or similar) and the actual work gets done on that format. For larger files (where size matters more) that will take a while which could conflict with the realtime nature of ChucK. It also typically means that some location on the HD is set where the file is temporarily stored though I suppose it could be unpacked directly to values in SndBuf.

Another issue might be that ChucK uses a library to load audio files and I'm not sure that one supports these formats.

So; it's not a bad idea at all, in fact it sounds quite convenient but it's not without questions either.

Plankhead · Joined: Apr 24, 2008 Posts: 14 Location: Long Island

I know there's an MP3 method of encoding a wave file, but ChucK can't read that. If it's as simple as coding it to allow Vorbis-encoded wav files, it should be easier.