Mac newbie - sound editor

Right, I am FINALLY a Mac owner

I have my 15" powerbook, motu 828 mkii, max/msp and soundflower all installed and working dandy.

Now all I want is some simple sound forge type program to let me simply record my max/msp ouput via soundflower.

$$$ware and freeware recommendations accepted.

(I know I cold patch something up in msp to do this but I want something quick and simple )

Anyone?

[KaOz]

u want peak 3.2?

[JcJr]

For simple editing/recording try AUDACITY or CACOPHONY .

[komakid]

what about tc sparks?

[bencodec]

for really really simple you could look at wiretap as well.

[bracket]

Sparks is pretty good

[cynthia]

or you got the x version of the old sound edit which is called sound studio i think, well simple fro just cutting up & recording stuff...

[pille'ocheoni]

spark xl (damn nice but slow)
peak all kinds of options with that(fast)
and what ben said wiretap rocks (global recording)
and the built in sound recorder in osx is pretty damn good too, i acually use it alot.

Thanks guys, will try peak and sparks out I think.

Wiretap looks handy too, any other recommendations for 'must have' little apps or utilities?

[yenorom]

Soundbrowser is handy, drop a load of audio files on it and it plays them one at a time. Good for auditioning folders full of drum samples.

[bencodec]

soundhack - odd interface, but interesting sonic options.
and i know your using soundflower, but i've found jack server to be quite useful for more complex inter software routings.

[mattp]

Steev

Are you running your ProTools on your Powerbook ?

Are you running your ProTools on your Powerbook ?

Yep I have an Mbox. I must admit I've not really looked at Protools yet tho, It's mainly for my course.

[bencodec]

oh, has anyone mentioned supercollider? i would say thats an increadable bit of freeware.

[Ava]

i know i always bang on about it, but SCServer is the bomb

[bencodec]

yeah, just wish i had a bit more control over SC. I just don't seem to think very well in line command. I'm much more comfortable with Max, but some of the things you can do with SC and the sound quality is incredible.
Ava, have you found any really good learning tools for SC?

[Ava]

i totally love the command line interface, i find it a lot easier to use than maxmsp, which i have more or less given up on, except when doing stuff in midi. my new liveset is written totally in SC, just using the command line interface - i didn't have time to build a GUI in time for my first gig with it.

bencodec: i went on the IDM 04 summer school in london this summer, it was a really excellent course. the tutorials are really good, here is the link to them :

http://www.sicklincoln.org/code/sc3tutorial.tar.gz

they are all live SC files, so you can run bits of code as you get to them. they cover most aspects of what you can do with SC. they key things to get your head round, to make music easily is the scheduling stuff (.sched, tasks, routines and patterns) and synth and bus structure (writing synths that make noise and synths that process noise, and then routing signals between them)

the 'building a simple drum machine' patches in the tutorials above are a great introduction to more complex things, such as GUI's and making your own classes.

hope this helps

SC I may try someday, I'm loving Max and not really hitting any brickwalls with it, especially after doing a two week intro+advabced course at Goldsmiths this summer...

I guess if GUI stuff in SC is more complicated than Max you could build the UI in Max and then use OSC to link to SC innards?

[bencodec]

see thats what i had been hoping to do originally. I'm not sure anymore if thats really gonna be any easier in reality.

well i love Max, it's a way of working that i'm much more comfortable with, but there are some very bad ass things about SC. It's worth the peek, even if all you do is play with some of the examples.

[garew]

I have been playing around with SC for a while. All I have to say. Jit library. Gui is nice, but when you start down that road things get shit loads more complicated. Not just writting the gui, but data managment and memory.

[Ava]

@steev : you could certainly use osc to make max talk to SC, but it would be slower and probably a bit limited, and will probably wind up being more complicated than just using one or the other.

@bencodec : there's definitaly a lot of levels where SC can be used. for a while, i only made samples with it to put into a soft sampler. for example, you could make it save off 10 kick drums, each with slightly different parameters, and then pick the one you like the best to put into your track

@garew : i'm finding JITLib hard to get my head round at the moment. the problem lies in making everything sync to a clock. So i abandoned jitlib, and now i'm just using a lot of environment variable ( the ones with a ~ at the front), and changing them as the music plays. so it's kind of semi-live coding. the thing to remember with GUI's is that the GUI engine runs at a different clock rate to the scheduler. so anytime you schedule something to be read from a GUI, you have to use the {}.defer method. it's a pain in the arse to be honest, which is why i went down the route of just a text based interface

editing to add this: .defer is covered in the drum machine patch in the above tutorials

[mattp]

steev : what about using Jackosx to make the two talk together ?

[mattp]

steev : I'm also a Mac newbie ... I bought a secondhand G4 1.25Ghz DP .. and I love it

Originally posted by mattp
steev : I'm also a Mac newbie ... I bought a secondhand G4 1.25Ghz DP .. and I love it

Yeah me too... I really didn't like OS9.. But OSX seems to be a real jump ahead of Windows to me, still... I don't think I'll be leaving sound forge behind!

[yenorom]

fscape beta - a weird audio processor, not sure how to use it but it looks promissing.

timetoy - a simple to use timestrecher

[garew]

ava, pdefs are quatized and the dur arg is a sort of tempo. I'll look into a normal tempo, but I think that's tempoclock. Which is global. I hear ya on the gui thing. I'd rather make music for a while.

[mattp]

Steev : Have you got your Nord Modular working with OSX ?

yenorom : fscape looks cool. Ta

Havent tried the nord with OSX yet... its on the list!

I may well keep nord stuff on my PC.

[yenorom]

The osx editor is ok as long as you don't right click-> delete a module. Use the delete key and everything should be cool.

One thig I did notice is that if the editor screws up it isn't a disaster as the patch you are editing is on the nord anyway, re-open the editor and get back to it.

The g2 editor is better though