SPspeps·Jan 15, 2019
Literate C version: https://pbat.ch/proj/voc/
Literate depot: https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/voc
Actually compiled source is there: https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/Soundpipe/blob/master/modul...
In Pink TrombonePaulBatchelor
Soundpipe
C2015–2019
PaulBatchelor / Soundpipe · Archived
Soundpipe
A lightweight music DSP library.
3Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
64GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A lightweight music DSP library.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-06-19 17:33:40 UTC to 2019-01-15 20:38:53 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sources> Where I see the real potential is using the native language of DAWs (digital audio workstation) like Protools, Ableton, and leveraging their native languages to write new scripts and library extensions for hardware.
Most of these DAWs are written in C/C++. In many cases, things are really closed down (looking at you ProTools), so its difficult/impossible to write extensions unless you intend to sell it commercially.
Renoise has a pretty good API in Lua for building plugins, which I thought was kind of neat.
Ableton has Max4Live which I think counts for an extension language.
As far as "native" code goes, I've been working a library of high quality DSP modules that you can use to build plugins called Soundpipe:
http://www.github.com/PaulBatchelor/Soundpipe.git
In Skoar – A musical programming languageI've had a lot of experience with various musical languages (ChucK, Csound, Supercollider, Max/MSP, PD, Faust etc.) I've even designed a few music languages for myself. For what it's worth, I did go to a music school and graduated with a bachelors degree in music, with a strong focus in computer music composition.
In the case of Alda, I'm a little underwhelmed. To be fair, it seems that the author of this software has done a good job meeting his goals. The syntax does look quite intuitive, basing it off of Lilypond syntax was a good choice IMO. I wouldn't call it a programming lanuage, and it can't do everything I want, but it seems to fit certain types of music quite well. Here is my big issue:
>In the near future, Alda’s scope will be expanded to include sounds synthesized from basic waveforms, samples loaded from sound files, and perha
Read the rest
ps other forms of synthesis.
I don't want to say Alda sounds "bad", because soundfonts, samples, and basic waveforms have their place for certain styles of music, but it is certainly quite limiting. Considering that there are massive books written about the "perhaps other forms of synthesis", it doesn't seem like sound itself to be too big a focus.
From what I'm reading, Alda is essentially a MIDI file generator. It doesn't actually produce music, rather, it sends MIDI instructions for how to play music somewhere and leaves it up some other program to make the sounds. All of the other music languages I've mentioned can actually make music internally.
Have you ever considered using other music languages with Alda. Overtone is just Supercollider + Clojure, so I'm sure you do something similar. I imagine it would be pretty trivial to get Alda to write a Csound score, since it's basically just a text table. PD has libpd, which I've had limited success with. I might as well mention my project Soundpipe as a possible DSP engine as well: www.github.com/PaulBatchelor/Soundpipe.git
Soundpipe – A lightweight music DSP library written in C
58 points · Open discussion