Tune Smithy 3.0 released - 25th January 2008

For the new features since the 2.4 release in 2003, see:
http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/whats_new.htm

Some of you may remember our discussion on this list of the new Waveform Player when I first developed it. It benefited a lot from that discussion and this is the first release.

The waveform player specialises in making pure harmonic timbres using maths functions (polynomials, bessel functions, trig functions etc). It's motivated by the observation that pure harmonic timbres with no inharmonicity at all have exactly repeating waveforms. So the idea is to
turn that around the other way, and make an exactly repeating waveform using any mathematical formula, and see what it sounds like.

So - it's a bit different from the usual sine waves based sounds, as when you make new sounds, you can use any formula you like - Tune Smithy will automatically add a linear or quadratic term if necessary to balance the areas above and below and make the ends join up (and can smooth them if you like too) - and you can use your formula for a quarter wave, half wave, or the complete wave.

It uses double precision floating point arithmetic throughout so the waves are very exacty generated. Also, you can render the audio directly to a file too, if you want to bypass the digital to audio and back to digital conversions in the soundcard and save the waveform exactly as it was made.

The menu of example instruments also includes plucked sounds, time varying, and inharmonic sounds as well got by transforming its basic harmonic timbre sounds in various ways.

You can read about it here:
http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/waveform_player.htm

The new Out for In devices option lets you retune large orchestral scores, and can be used with GPO - originally for Rick McGowan on his suggestion.

The CSound capabilities of the program are innovative with the automated CSound orchestra builder. It lets you just choose your CSound instruments for the sixteen midi channels from a list and choose your desired stereo pan position for each one - and FTS will automatically build a CSound orchestra incorporating them all - something that normally requires a fair amount of recoding and renumbering by hand. It works with any CSound instrument.
It is easy to use - just select the CSound save type, choose the CSound instruments for all the parts of your piece from a drop list - and then record to CSound just as you would do to midi, by pressing a record button. Everything else is done automatically.

If you want to add your own CSound instruments to the list that's easy too. You have to add an extra section to tell FTS what parameters to expect for your instrument and the type for any frequency or velocity type parameters (CPS, PCH, OCT, MIDI, VEL, AMP or DB) and include any score initialisation statements required such as tables in another section, and normally that's about it, apart from the rare situations where it has a zakinit line. If it does, all you need to do is to edit it to make sure that the two numbers are the same, make one of them larger if nec.

To get started with this enter the desired name for the new instrument and click Edit and a sample .csd file will be made with further instructions - or take a look at some of the sample instruments to see how they are done.

see:
http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/csound.htm

Another feature likely to be of particular interest to microtonalists is the Audio Pitch tracer
http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/pitch_tracer.htm

Tune Smithy can also now handle ratios of 64 bit numbers exactly, i.e. numbers with up to nineteen or so digits above and below - which includes nearly all the numbers needed in microtonal work.

There's lot's more that's new to discover in this release. Most of all - I have done lots of work to make it more user friendly and easier to navigate.
http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/fts_download.htm

I hope this new release will be of value to the microtonal community, and more generally. I'd like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for all those on this forum who have helped in one way or another over the years while I've been developing the software, by discussing the work in progress, supplying information, suggesting ideas etc.

Thanks,

Robert

Congrats on the release!!

-Carl

Congratulations Robert!

Oz.
----- Original Message -----
From: Robert walker
To: tuning@yahoogroups.com
Sent: 29 Ocak 2008 Salı 6:38
Subject: [tuning] Tune Smithy 3.0 released - 25th January 2008

For the new features since the 2.4 release in 2003, see:
http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/whats_new.htm

Some of you may remember our discussion on this list of the new Waveform Player when I first developed it. It benefited a lot from that discussion and this is the first release.

The waveform player specialises in making pure harmonic timbres using maths functions (polynomials, bessel functions, trig functions etc). It's motivated by the observation that pure harmonic timbres with no inharmonicity at all have exactly repeating waveforms. So the idea is to
turn that around the other way, and make an exactly repeating waveform using any mathematical formula, and see what it sounds like.

So - it's a bit different from the usual sine waves based sounds, as when you make new sounds, you can use any formula you like - Tune Smithy will automatically add a linear or quadratic term if necessary to balance the areas above and below and make the ends join up (and can smooth them if you like too) - and you can use your formula for a quarter wave, half wave, or the complete wave.

It uses double precision floating point arithmetic throughout so the waves are very exacty generated. Also, you can render the audio directly to a file too, if you want to bypass the digital to audio and back to digital conversions in the soundcard and save the waveform exactly as it was made.

The menu of example instruments also includes plucked sounds, time varying, and inharmonic sounds as well got by transforming its basic harmonic timbre sounds in various ways.

You can read about it here:
http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/waveform_player.htm

The new Out for In devices option lets you retune large orchestral scores, and can be used with GPO - originally for Rick McGowan on his suggestion.

The CSound capabilities of the program are innovative with the automated CSound orchestra builder. It lets you just choose your CSound instruments for the sixteen midi channels from a list and choose your desired stereo pan position for each one - and FTS will automatically build a CSound orchestra incorporating them all - something that normally requires a fair amount of recoding and renumbering by hand. It works with any CSound instrument.
It is easy to use - just select the CSound save type, choose the CSound instruments for all the parts of your piece from a drop list - and then record to CSound just as you would do to midi, by pressing a record button. Everything else is done automatically.

If you want to add your own CSound instruments to the list that's easy too. You have to add an extra section to tell FTS what parameters to expect for your instrument and the type for any frequency or velocity type parameters (CPS, PCH, OCT, MIDI, VEL, AMP or DB) and include any score initialisation statements required such as tables in another section, and normally that's about it, apart from the rare situations where it has a zakinit line. If it does, all you need to do is to edit it to make sure that the two numbers are the same, make one of them larger if nec.

To get started with this enter the desired name for the new instrument and click Edit and a sample .csd file will be made with further instructions - or take a look at some of the sample instruments to see how they are done.

see:
http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/csound.htm

Another feature likely to be of particular interest to microtonalists is the Audio Pitch tracer
http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/pitch_tracer.htm

Tune Smithy can also now handle ratios of 64 bit numbers exactly, i.e. numbers with up to nineteen or so digits above and below - which includes nearly all the numbers needed in microtonal work.

There's lot's more that's new to discover in this release. Most of all - I have done lots of work to make it more user friendly and easier to navigate.
http://www.robertinventor.com/software/tunesmithy/fts_download.htm

I hope this new release will be of value to the microtonal community, and more generally. I'd like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for all those on this forum who have helped in one way or another over the years while I've been developing the software, by discussing the work in progress, supplying information, suggesting ideas etc.

Thanks,

Robert

Hi Carl and Onan,

Thanks for the congrats. It is great to have it finished at last, affer working on 3.0 since the beginning of 2004, so that's four years of work pretty much full time on FTS most of that time too (more than full time really in terms of hours per week). So a real red letter day!

Robert