Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

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RockHopper
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by RockHopper »

tatch wrote:some inspiration for shuriken! http://createdigitalmusic.com/2015/05/j ... -live-mac/
That looks really cool. I'm working on a new feature that allows users to set the number of JACK outputs in Shuriken and then route audio slices to certain outputs with the help of a simple matrix. You could then connect Shuriken's outputs to a whole bunch of plug-ins hosted in Carla. With such a setup you could probably achieve similar results to what Fraction can do.
motosega wrote:it'd be nice to have a way of auditioning without a midi keyboard though. wouldn't it make sense to let the spacebar work like that?
I could make the 'A' key work like a key on a MIDI keyboard. The spacebar's function is to play the whole sequence of audio slices. It doesn't really make sense to 'release' any of the notes in the sequence prematurely (how long should a note play before being released?)
motosega wrote:attack AND release work perfectly on the mpc500!
:)
motosega
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by motosega »

yes, the "a" key would be the logical thing.


as an aside........
i'm a bit stuck getting files in and out of my akai S1000. getting some kind of scsi drive would be good, but expensive and cumbersome.

the other way of getting sounds into a sampler is sample dump standard aka SDS .(maybe we talked about this before)

i've found a lot of information about midi sample dump standard.
sample dump is fairly slow, but it works with most hardware samplers.

sds files are actually a stream of sysex packets. there are already tools on linux which can convert wavs to sds files(sndfile, sox).

but i can't find a working sds file dumper for linux.

the interesting things is this: you can send sysex with amidi --send-file mysysexdump
but......and a big but. you can't send sds files to a sampler with amidi because the packets in the sds file need to be sent one at a time.

there are two ways to send sds to a sampler, open loop and closed loop.

in closed loop the sampler sends an ACK packet every time it is ready for a new packet.(or a NACK if it was a bad packet)

the open loop method is much simpler, you just send a packet, then wait a while before sending the next one.

obviously this is slower, but its dead simple. you basically just need to send the sds file to a midi port and wait a while between packets.

if you're interested in adding midi sample dump to shuriken, i'll do a big google session and find all the source code and doccumentation about sds on the internet and post it here.

sds opens up a whole world of hardware samplers, including, yamaha A3000/4000/5000, all the akai samplers since the S900(not most of the mpcs though), roland, emu, and even the new electron sampler. from what can gather, most people with old samplers have to keep an old computer arround just to dump samples.

it might be possible to modify amidi to wait between sending packets with a few lines of patching. i had a look at the sourcecode but i couldn't find the function that actually sends the file.
my c knowledge is limited to developing simple gadgets with arduino, so the sourcecode is a bit beyond my level of understanding.

i'm finishing up the theater season so in the next few months i'll have time to dedicate. with a bit of hand holding i could maybe get a patch to amidi working.
asbak
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by asbak »

From reading the MIDI specs it looks like it's 31250 bits/sec so divide by 8 and 1000 and you get around 3.9 kilobytes?
So assuming there'll be other traffic and overheads bringing the bandwidth available for SDS down perhaps one would be looking at around 3.5 K/sec?
So a 1 MByte sample would take roughly 285 seconds or about 4:45 mins (very rough guestimate) to transmit?

I guess SDS would definitely be handy for transmitting sample data when time is not a factor and you just want to dump the data to an internal storage device in the sampler but it wouldn't serve much usable purpose for live type usage.
For the Yamaha AXXXX family this would be quite useful because it uses a proprietary filesystem. The only ways I know of to dump data into the Yamaha would be via SCSI and CD-Rom with their proprietary CD-ROM sound collections, via the floppy drive or via SCSI and certain older copies of waveform editing software, Yamaha's limited sound dump utility (assuming you can still find a version that works) or else the CDBonk / Disky utilities written by a third party which can dump Yamaha CD's from a computer connected via SCSI and WinXP to the AXXXX. I think it may also be possible to take a backup of the Drive on the sampler but can't remember anymore.

There is also a utility which can apparently convert the Yamaha samples into wavfiles from what I recall. I cannot remember whether it could do wavfile to the Yamaha format.

Moving samples into and out of the AXXXX family has always been problematic. The sample loading times are slow too which doesn't help. It's a pity because sonically these are excellent devices and they can be used as Live FX units as well.
Some Focal / 20.04 audio packages and resources https://midistudio.groups.io/g/linuxaudio
motosega
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by motosega »

yep, for all its positives, sample dump standard has the downside of being very slow.
it still is the most ubiquitous way of supporting hardware samplers, everybody has a midi interface.

i'm having another go at getting send-sds to work.hopefully i was doing something wrong. studying the source code right now...i'm currently working on a project on arduino so i still have some C in my short term memory unfortunatley it seems that programmers stop writing comments after they reach a certain level of proficency, making trawling through the functions a bit of an ordeal.

https://github.com/bsl/send-sds
Last edited by motosega on Tue May 19, 2015 8:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
motosega
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by motosega »

asbak wrote: Moving samples into and out of the AXXXX family has always been problematic. The sample loading times are slow too which doesn't help. It's a pity because sonically these are excellent devices and they can be used as Live FX units as well.
they are indeed fantastic samplers, a friend of mine had one back in the day. i remember the effects being great. i was torn between getting an A3000 and an akai, but i really wanted lots of individual outs and a hard disk, and i found an s1000hd very cheap.

wasn't there a pc editor for the A3000?, perhaps it works in wine?

maybe vintage samplers are for masochists, perhaps we actually like the pain!
RockHopper
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by RockHopper »

Hi, sorry for not replying sooner. I haven't had much time to spend on Shuriken as I've been busy swatting up on C# and SQL for a new job as a software developer.

I had a quick read at the SDS spec. It looks like it might be quite time-consuming to implement and I'm a bit pushed for time at the moment. "send-sds" looks promising. It might be worth opening an issue on GitHub if you're having trouble with it.
motosega
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by motosega »

Rockhopper, no problem, i'll get something to work standalone, then bug you to integrate it. :mrgreen:
hopefully real work won't keep you too busy!

in the mean time i had an epiphany about send-sds.

the midi in indicator on my S1000 lights up when the packet arrives, but it dosen't go into sds receive mode. i'm 90% sure that it was develpoed with a diferent sampler and sends a non standard dump header. what i need to do is capture a working dump header then modify send-sds to send that instead.(that part of the source code i did understand)
motosega
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by motosega »

akai s1000 continued........

great news!
now i have a working usb zip drive and a working scsi zip drive!

akaitools works
i am able to format with akaiformat. populate with s3000 samples using wav2akai

i have the latest s1000 os that can load s3000 programs and samples.
since akaitools writes s3000 programs, we can be sure it will work with many other akai samplers s2800, s3000xl s2000 and also anything else capable of loading akai samples, e.g roland s760, yamaha a3000. and probably more....

i'm so happy i can finaly give up using recycle with sds midi transfer! although shuffling zip disks is going to be a pain too

since sdcard or cf card to scsi converters are just scsi block devices, this means that it should work for them too.

so rockhopper, i hope you haven't been totaly consumed by the day job!

although i though i had an easy summer season, i've been inundated with work in far flug parts of the country, and literaly havent touched a sampler for a week.
RockHopper
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by RockHopper »

motosega wrote:great news!
now i have a working usb zip drive and a working scsi zip drive!

akaitools works
i am able to format with akaiformat. populate with s3000 samples using wav2akai
Excellent! :D
motosega wrote:so rockhopper, i hope you haven't been totaly consumed by the day job!
I'll try and get a bit more done this weekend, I'd like to get the multiple JACK outputs finished off. After that I've still to add copy & paste and keyboard shortcuts to move slice points. Once that's done I think I'll put out a release.
rwtig
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by rwtig »

Really great project. I thought I'd add a couple of things that I think would be cool to include:

1) I may have missed this but it would be useful to have a button that deletes all slices.
2) Be able to zoom in and out and move left and right using midi control knobs on a midi controller (could have some configuration function that says for example "move the knob you want to use for zooming in and out" and detects which one you want to use). The idea being you can improve workflow by using only your midi controller.
3) In a similar vein be able to move a slice point let and right using a midi knob (the magnitude of movement would be determined by the level of zoom).
4) Be able to crop an imported sample so that you could load in a whole song and crop it down to the parts you want to slice up.
RockHopper
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by RockHopper »

Hi rwtig, glad you're enjoying Shuriken!
rwtig wrote:it would be useful to have a button that deletes all slices.
I'm not sure if you mean audio slices or slice points. If you mean slice points then yes, a button to remove all slice points could be useful.
rwtig wrote:Be able to zoom in and out and move left and right using midi control knobs on a midi controller ... be able to move a slice point left and right using a midi knob
Nice idea.
rwtig wrote:Be able to crop an imported sample so that you could load in a whole song and crop it down to the parts you want to slice up.
You can actually do this at the moment. Just stick slice points at the beginning and end of the section(s) you're interested in then click "Slice" and delete the bits you don't want.
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by rwtig »

I know the Giada project http://www.giadamusic.com/source has midi detection functionality, so there might be some useful code there for zooming etc. with the midi controller. I will have a look into it but am not much of a cpp programmer unfortunately.
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by RockHopper »

Multiple JACK outputs now complete and pushed to GitHub. Note: although Real-time Time Stretch mode does work with multiple outputs, you'll need a hefty processor if you've got several outputs. Selecting "short" window size from the options menu may help.
rwtig wrote:I know the Giada project http://www.giadamusic.com/source has midi detection functionality, so there might be some useful code there for zooming etc. with the midi controller. I will have a look into it but am not much of a cpp programmer unfortunately.
Thanks for the heads up. I'm very pushed for time at the moment so it might take me a while to get round to this.
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by motosega »

hi rockhopper,
my offer to make a video explaining the akai mpc500 workflow when you make a new relese still stands:

in the mean time i've been using akaitools to export from shuriken to akai S3000 formatted zip disks.
having this integrated into shurikens export dialog would be magic!

after exporting as wav.
its a two step process for each file.

1 convert to akai s3000 format samples (.a3s) with wav2akai
wav2akai -v -d export_destination_dir -n exported_filename inputfilename.wav
files must be 16bit pcm. 44100hz ( to be safe, other rates *might* work) mono or stereo (stereo file are split into filename-L and filename-R by wav2akai because the akai samplers do stereo that way)

2 write to disk with akaiwrite.

akaiwrite -f path/to/device/or/image -p akai_partition_number -d akai_directory_name(VOLUME) filename.a3s

the command akailist can be used to list the contents of akai volumes.

i'm making some bash scripts to do it for the mean time.
rwtig
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Re: Shuriken Beat Slicer 0.4

Post by rwtig »

motosega wrote:hi rockhopper,
my offer to make a video explaining the akai mpc500 workflow when you make a new relese still stands:
Just to say, I'd be very interested to see that video.
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