I'm not a pro by any means as a programmer, but in my spare time I develop applications/plugins/silly stuff not only audio related, but globally.

I thought I could share two things with you. Maybe you enjoy it, then leave a like. And if you really hate it - you need a doctor. But if you dislike it, you're welcome to say so as well.

The first thing is an application. You probably saw a lot of audio visualizers. All that geometrical figures that are animated. Doesn't it get boring? I thought, the only real fun is if sombody dances to your music, no matter the genre. So I created "Dancer".



It is an audio player, but very limited (See above, I'm no pro). Since I can't afford an mp3 licence, you can only load .wav and .ogg files, and some people told me that not even all .wav formats are supported. But if you run your first song you will forget about those little issues

Btw: There are NO premade animations of any kind. Instead it is a physics simulation, and the joints are stimulated by the audio. You could as well just play a speech or white noise, but it wouldn't be much fun, right?

As being created back in 2011 and making use of your graphic card, the application uses certain files of DX9, and it will tell you, should they be missing. You can safely install DX9 besides your higher DX versions. It is a separate install that doesn't overwrite or replace any files of newer installations. You can get DX9 from Micro$oft. If you have ever played a game that was published three or four years ago, you already have DX9.
With Dancer you also get a full featured audio meter - showing Peak, RMS and DR . The applciation is free of any kind of malware, no virus, no trojan. no nothing. Some people reported a false positive with Avira, but I could never resolve it. So decide yourself if you want ot run it or not.
Direct download here

Another thing I want to share with you is probably only of interest for those who know a bit about DSP-programming. I am currently working on a prototype of a new oscillator. It's basically a sine oscillator, but with a twist (no spoilers yet) that makes it very interesting. Here's a short sound demo. This is only one of the new oscillator playing! No fm, no pwm, no effects, no other oscillator. Just that oscillator, while I modulate the math that creates the waveform in realtime. And it is really lightweight. In a quick vst test I could run well over 300 of them (on a 10 year old Athlon II X2 250 @ 3GHz)with a 5-note-chord (5 to force a second SSE instruction in parallel). In a final plugin it will of course be way less, since lfos, envelopes and effects will also use some cpu. However, I'm really excited, so I'm sharing this small bit.
First impression.mp3

 

Wow this is actually really cool! Unfortunately I can't test because I'm on mac

 

Last edited: Jun 3, 2016

The app is really fun. Gonna show a few friends. Put a mix of a hard core song in there and set the sensitivity and activity to max, pretty funny to see that guy mosh around in there.

That oscillator stuff is above my head, but it sounded like something from Ecco the Dolphin, so that's always cool.

Thanks for sharing your work with us.

 

Dancer: OGG is great!! As most DAWs support it, no problem.

About mp3 licensing (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing.2C_ownership_and_legislation):
It seems like most relevant patents all have expired worldwide already, with only a few still valid in the U.S. until 2017.

Anyway, thanks a lot!

 

Thank you so much. Your words really mean a lot to me!
I might provide you with more stuff in the future, if you like to?

Regarding mp3 licensing: To not risk anything I better wait until april 2017, then probably redo Dancer with a streaming option ;)

 

1. There should be free audio/MP3/AAC/FLAC/WV decoding libs for C/++ for whatever language you're using?

 

Dancer is awesome! Since it's free (non-commercial) and only reads audio, not writes, you can freely use MP3 format safely already. Many, many free apps do this already (see: basically every music player). The trouble area is when you produce a commercial app that writes to MP3 (uses mp3 encoder) and don't pay up for the license. There are lots of FOSS libs that (legally) decode it just fine! I use JUCE's decoding implementation personally, but theres lots of alternatives to that, too.

I don't think there are very many audio dev/DSP people here sadly I only know of me plus one other person who's just getting started. You should still post about the oscillator code though, cuz I'm interested even if nobody else is!

 

That's so cool, @tulamide
Dancer moves like my Presenter, Midnight Furie, when she's been at the vodka bottle!

Loving the OSC, man. I could see myself using that badboy a lot.

 

Thanks a lot @Zentropy My last check about mp3 is from 2011, and back then there were several patents that forced you to pay even for decoding. And, if I start working on it right now, it will be at least summer next year, before I'm done (I just don't have much time for my hobbies)

Also, I won't reveal how it works, but I will definitely keep you and @DarthFader up-to-date about the oscillator