mic's blog

We are releasing version 4 of Orinj.

Beta release of Orinj

This is a beta release.

Beta means that this release has not been fully tested. We do not guarantee that it is stable. Use it if you are adventurous and want to experiment with the new features of Orinj.

When equalizing vocals, much of the work involves removing offending frequencies. We do so by cutting out a narrow band of frequencies.

Typical recommendations are:

• If there is too much low frequency rumble, cut down on frequencies below 80 Hz.
• If the vocals are booming, look for an equalizer that can put a magnitude reducing notch with a middle frequency somewhere between 100 Hz and 300 Hz, dipping down to, say, -30 dB, and a width at -3 dB of probably about 100 Hz. You would have to experiment by moving the notch up and down the interval between 100 Hz and 300 Hz to find the offending frequency band.

I have been testing various sine sweeps for use in impulse reverbs. I thought it would be useful to show the Java code for creating a short wave file with a sine sweep. The code is simple, but also interesting. It is interesting not only because it creates a sine sweep, but also because it shows the structure of simple wave files. Beginner DSP designers, who want to create or read wave files, may find it useful.

Often, a song becomes stuck. Sometimes it is the arrangement. The song is boring, slow, or repetitive, or a hook is missing. Sometimes it is the mix. Perhaps the bottom end is hollow and unexciting. There is too much in the middle. Perhaps the mix is just a flat nothing going nowhere. Sometimes it is the song itself. Maybe the lyrics are corny. Or the melody has so much pop and march that it belongs only in a movie soundtrack – probably only in a western.

I can list what I want in a DAW. I have thought about this.

It is not like developers are just waiting for my opinion, but this could be interesting. Popular recording software keeps expanding, adding new functionality, each piece more obscure than the other. Is all of it necessary? Can my list be shorter than the laundry list of everything?

Here is a list of DAW features. It is short.

I thought designing a MIDI-to-wave synthesizer would be difficult. I wanted to be able to convert a MIDI file to a wave file without having to play the file and record the playback. As it turns out, a synthesizer can be very simple. I put one together – perhaps not a great one, but a good enough one.

I wrote about our plans for Orinj version 4 about a year ago. As usual, some of our ideas from that time made it into version 4. Some did not. Here is how version 4 is shaping up.

It occurred to me that the way I mix songs now is different than the way I mixed songs before. I cannot say I have gotten better. It is likely that my taste has changed a bit – tastes always evolve. The differences in my approach seem minor, but the differences in the result sounds significant.

The third edition of "Digital Signal Processing for Audio Applications" is out. In the very first comment to the first edition someone said the book did not contain enough code, but only mathematics. The third edition introduces code samples in a separate volume 2.