David Plans Casal
3/22/2005 11:12:00 AM
Hi Matju,
On 22 Mar 2005, at 08:41, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, David Casal wrote:
>
>> I'm looking for a good Ruby sound library...
>
> I am maintainer for the Ruby bindings to PureData, which is a realtime
> visual programming language for audio. I am also the author of a video
> plugin for PureData, and actually those things are bundled together
> under
> the name GridFlow.
The world's so small. Met you on IRC last saturday ;-) (nick: pland)
> I use GridFlow for interactive setups in art galleries, museums, and
> music
> shows, under contract with local artists (mostly in Montréal and
> Ottawa/Gatineau). I'm doing that stuff part-time while struggling with
> a
> degree (the degree is over now, so I'm going to do this full-time now,
> hopefully)
Does this mean that Ruby-PD bindings might get deeper (audio buffer
access?), if you have time?
> It would be cool to have more elaborate bindings because the ones I
> have
> coded are rather minimal (that is, only what I need to have for the
> video
> plugin). In the future it would be cool to be able to have complete
> access to PureData objects, in the same way that the Python bindings to
> PureData can. Especially missing are ways to access audio buffers. I
> think
> it wouldn't be that difficult to implement, but I haven't needed them
> yet.
Ah! Ok I understand now. In my case, because of my music background and
the fact I wanted to learn Ruby, I thought it would be great to be able
to -hear- my study of Ruby, if you see what I mean.
So, what I was after was a way to exemplify concepts from the second
edition of the Pickaxe, in sound.
I played with PureData during my degree, and I guess having access to
PD objects from Ruby would be as close as I get to heaven! ;-) But I
suppose I need to find an intermediate solution for now...
> What do you think about it? Is it overkill for your needs? What do you
> want to achieve with the audio library?
So, see above, but here's a summary : I think Gridflow is an amazing
idea and project (got some osx compilation trouble I'll address
ex-list), and would love to start learning it.
But browsing the pd flow ruby examples in there got me kinda lost.
Firstly because I couldn't run it (compilation), but also because I
didn't quite get how PD would pick Gridflow up and viceversa (other
than -lib)
What I'm looking for, I guess, is the ability to play with sampled
sound for now (similar to Cocoa's NSSound, but a bit deeper), in a way
that allows me to explore ruby by ear. So simple sample loading,
playing, buffering, maybe some DSP...perhaps some MIDI (though I see
midilib)...like I said, PDRuby would be of course ideal, but the basics
through pure Ruby and Gridflow would be even better right now, since
I'm a complete n00b to Ruby.
Is that too vague?
> PS: The big problem with audio and Ruby, though, is that the garbage
> collector takes too much CPU in one chunk, so that low-latency audio
> just
> fails horribly. For ordinary audio needs that's not really a problem
> unless the computer is slow, but many people want low-latency so that
> they
> can replace their expensive and unflexible guitar pedals by something
> extremely versatile, the computer.
I see. Of course.
Well I aim to get to a point where I can do that too. And so, I -will-
need a low-latency, probably C-implemented (like PD) engine behind me,
and I guess I see Ruby as the higher-level, 'thinking' language for
composition, and pedal-making.
My guess is you do too?
What can I do to help? I'm studying the Pickaxe now, and I'll download
tarball of Gridflow (tried CVS unsuccessfully) and try on OSX
(10.3.8)...is there a short summary of how to get GF and PD talking
anywhere (other than website docs?)
Thanks for you reply, Matju, I look forward to working in Gridflow.
Cheers,
David