This is a collection of Sound Editor Programs for Linux. Copyright 2005 Edition Arnold Kochman. Other copyrights apply, including but not limited to the
The programs are distributed in the form of compressed or regular tar archives. Programs are distributed as source and will have to be compiled. Naturally, I cannot certify that they are all worthwhile for any particular purpose.
There are quite a number of sound editors available for Linux, but I have found many of them problematical. In many cases they make use of libraries that are themselves under development and therefore unstable. Worse yet, some even make use of library versions representing a snapshot between releases. I have found three packages that I feel merit consideration, though for me the snd package written by Bill Schottstaedt is the clear favorite.
I have tried to include every module that you will need that you are
not likely to have on your system already. However, there are
variations, and I can't take every possibility into account.
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snd - A sound editor modelled loosely after Emacs and an old PDP-10
sound editor named Dpysnd. It can accommodate any number of sounds
each with any number of channels, and can be customized and extended
using either Guile or Ruby.
Like Cool Edit, Snd has been in lengthy development. Snd author Bill Schottstaedt has programmed it continuously since 1996, but his involvement with writing soundfile editors dates back to the late 1970s when he wrote the Dpysnd audio editor for the PDP-10 minicomputer. However, Snd's user interface and other basic design differences are problematic for Cool Edit users, and it is easy to miss Snd's great power and utility. The author has tried to make much of the power of the program available to the novice by creating a working environment similar to Cool Edit. Cool Edit's interface is uniformly designed for editing and processing soundfiles. Almost every action and function in the program can be accessed and controlled by the mouse, and users can navigate their way through the entire program by pointing and clicking. Thanks to this uniform interface a novice easily learns and remembers the program's behavior and more quickly moves into actually working with the program. On the other hand, Snd has been designed to function within a rich sound processing and music composition software environment developed at CCRMA, Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. That environment includes the Common LISP Music (CLM) sound synthesis language, the Common Music (CM) scoring tools for CLM and other output formats (such as Csound and MIDI), and the Common Music Notation (CMN) package. Indeed, Snd could be considered as a graphic display front-end for CLM: the standard build incorporates CLM as a built-in module, Snd provides a window called the Listener for entering code to access the module's synthesis and processing functions, and the interface provides various ways to play and represent the newly synthesized sound. In contrast to the uniformity of Cool Edit, Snd's user interface could be thought of as "multiform" by design. In the default GUI the mouse is extensively employed, but far more program control is available through Snd's Emacs-style keyboard commands. And while considerable processing power lurks under its surface access to that power has been restricted to users willing to learn the necessary scripting language. Thus, in order to use Snd to its fullest potential the user must learn to manage Snd's more complex control interface and acquire some proficiency in the Guile/Scheme language. With that proficiency he can customize the program's appearance and behavior. Snd is publicly licensed and a source tarball is available for download from http://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/. However, it is fairly likely that you will have to obtain some of the packages on which it depends, but they are collected together in this distribution:
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sweep - Sweep is an audio editor and live playback tool for GNU/Linux,
BSD and compatible systems. It supports many music and voice formats
including WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and MP3, with multichannel
editing and LADSPA effects plugins. It is distributed under the GNU
General Public Licence. Sweep is a very nice program, and though is is
probably ultimately less powerful than snd, described above, it has
some advantages in ease of use.
To install, you will need the libsndfile package, version 1.0.0 or later, and a version of tdb. Since there is a good likelihood that you do not have these installed, they are included on this CD. For further information visit http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/index.html | ||||||||||||
| MusE - MusE is a MIDI/Audio sequencer with recording and editing capabilities written by Werner Schweer. MusE aims to be a complete multitrack virtual studio for Linux, it is published under the GNU General Public License. MusE requires the Qt package, which takes quite a bit of space. A Qt distribution is included on this CD. |