Re: The state of audio processing with Perl

[creamygoodness]

In a past life I made my living as an audio mastering engineer. I'm intrigued, but I haven't ever looked into the Audio:: namespace on CPAN. I've never done any real audio programming either, since I started coding in earnest only after leaving the recording biz. But by now I'm an half decent C and XS hacker, and I know a bunch about digital audio theory and audio production QC. It would be fabulous to connect those two worlds, and maybe my esoteric skillset will come in handy.

I'd love to teach myself about synthesis. Is there an "Audio Synthesis with Perl" book out there or something like it? I always assumed there wasn't because audio stuff requires a lot of bit twiddling.

[Joost]

I don't think there's any book about audio synthesis with perl. I learned most of the stuff I know from playing with my sythesizer, reading various online texts and writing C++ plugins for Buzz tracker (win32) & Amiga & C64 assembly programming.

As far as I'm concerned, the best current module for audio synthesis in perl is my Audio::LADSPA module - but that's mostly because there isn't really anything else :-) I'm planning a rewrite. Besides that, you will probably have to look at Ecasound or C-Sound for scriptable "external" sound engines. I also found Net::LibLO to be quite nice for controlling OSC capable audio programs.