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.
Five years ago, I wrote a post on the excommunication of the tritone by the catholic church. The tritone is an interval of six semitones (or three tones). The church excommunicated the tritone a long time ago. Presumably, they were hearing it as it used to sound then – with a tuning that was different than the tuning we use today. Today, we tune instruments so that the 12 notes on the chromatic scale split an octave evenly (i.e., the chromatic scale is equally tempered). In the past, tuning tried to get better use of harmonics (for example, the Pythogorean tuning).
We are mixing an album. Everything is progressing well, but there are problems with some of the initial recordings. Most of these are related to vocals. Sometimes they are actual problems, such as the vocal sounds too much like in a box and no amount of equalization can correct for that. Sometimes, it is not clear that there is an actual problem, but the vocalist is not happy either way. Perhaps the melody was not right. Perhaps the melody is correct, but a syllable does not hit the right pitch, there is a glaring "aaa", the timing of a word is out of place, and so on and so on.
