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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.

How do you design a digital wah wah? You take a peak filter and move it down and up the frequency spectrum. From where to where? I do not know. How fast? I do not know.

I have never made as many mistakes preparing a piece of software as I did with the Orinj phase oscilloscope. Some were understandable, some were just not that smart.

A lot of work was done between Orinj versions 2 and 3, but there is always more. My take on what is important and should be implemented soon is below.

Orinj is our software for recording and mixing, with multitrack sessions, wave and MIDI editing, drum loop creation, DSP effects, and so on, and so on. We have now released the beta 3.0.0 version of Orinj. It is available for free download, with some minor limitations as described below.