[gst-devel] Using gstreamer for modular music synth

Matthew.Romaine at parc.com Matthew.Romaine at parc.com
Tue Aug 13 20:43:02 CEST 2002


Hi Phil,

Just thought I would give you my $0.02.

I have been dabbling with GStreamer throughout the summer, and have been very impressed with the level of enthusiasm and support for the project.  Like any work/project in progress, features and functionality are constantly being added and updated, and I have found that when something is not working or has not been implemented yet, it often gets done in less than a week.  There are many folks working on GStreamer who are avid music/media fans, so when features are implemented, many similar factors you might consider when building a synth (for example :) are kept in mind.

That said, I think most of your concerns can be handled well with GStreamer.  Hopefully you know about MAX/MSP and pd; though not entirely like them, GStreamer's core would make building such applications quite simple.  In fact, if you perused the gstreamer site, you probably saw screenshots of the editor.  Wah-la :)

In some cases you might find that building your own module or plugin makes the most sense (after all, you are working on a *modular* synth, right?).  I think you will find GStreamer's architecture quite consistent and well in line with what you have in mind.  Since what you are building is relatively specific, you may find the need to write a handful of your own modules (you aren't just "streaming mp3s" or "playing avi's" after all), but I'm certain it will be easier then writing the capability from scratch.  After all, timing is *extremely* critical when streaming media, whether it be audio or video, and a lot of thought has gone into this for GStreamer.


At any rate, I wish you luck on your endeavors!

-Matt



------------------------
Matthew Romaine, Intern
PARC Inc.
Computer Science Lab
www.parc.xerox.com
1.650.812.4462
------------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Frost [mailto:daboy at sempiternity.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 8:22 PM
To: gstreamer-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [gst-devel] Using gstreamer for modular music synth

I've been developing a modular music synth call Io
(http://sf.net/projects/iosynth) for a few weeks, and someone told me
about gstreamer. I've spent the past few hours looking over
documentation and such, and I really think gstreamer is a very good
thing, but I have a few concerns. I'm not expecting full explanitions on
how to fix these things; I'm just tring to get a feel for just what
gstreamer is supposed to do, and if it's the right tool for my job.



- Realtime support

One goal of my project was to allow realtime synth, which means the
plugin system must have a low latency. Is there anything inherit in
gstreamer that will be a problem?



- Polyphonic instruments + really low-level modules

One of my main complaints about other software synth programs is that
each instrument can only play one note at a time. This means if you have
some instrument that's supposed to sound something like chimes, if you
play a note, it's cut off as soon as the seccond note is played rather
than letting both ring. My solution to this was to pass C++ vector
objects down the pipeline so that each note is seperated, and combined
only when the final sound of the instrument is produced.

If you don't understand the problem, consider this simple instrument:

A squarewave oscillator is hooked up to a lowpass filter. The lowpass
filter gets its cutoff frequency from a function generator which moves
the cutoff frequency down over the durration of the note. A note is
played, then another as the first is still playing. Now the cutoff
filter must filter two notes, each with a different cutoff frequency.
Thus, the inputs (from the oscillator and the function generator) must
be seperate as there is no way to apply the different filtering to each
note if the notes from the oscillator are combined.

 From what I have read of the docs, I imagine this could be implemented
 by defining another type, but is this wise? It could make it harder to
 connect these polyphonic plugins to other plugins, thus ruining the
 flexability that makes gstreamer good. Or, is there another solution to
 this problem?



 - Control of the instruments

 Obviously, there needs to be some mechinism to control the instruments,
 such as telling the oscillator when to play, for how long, and what
 note. Ideally, this control would be pluginized so that different
 sources could be used, such as a saved file, a MIDI device, etc.
 However, this data is not bit-based like audio or video, but rather
 event based, so passing it in a buffer would be costly, cumbersome, and
 just plain not-good. What are some possible solutions?


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