RLPF.ar

One of my students came to his lesson today rhapsodizing about a program he wanted to use in his final project: Atomic Cloud. Naturally, I encourage this kind of independent research! But there's a catch... it's shareware, $19 to register (half price at the time of this writing). My student can make sounds with it but neither save presets nor record the result, as those features are disabled in the demo version.

How to get around the limitations?

It turns out to be disturbingly easy. The description on the website reveals nothing that could not be done with SuperCollider's built-in TGrains unit generator. It's just a matter of mapping Atomic Cloud's inputs into a form that TGrains understands.

Behold: the sound-processing guts of $20 worth of software, recoded in SuperCollider in about 20 minutes and completely free. This version even does a few things the original can't: independent randomization of buffer rate, and the ability to automate several parameters at once using Patch inputs.

Instr("gran", { |buf, trigType = 0,
	start = 0, end = 1, scanRate = 1, jitter = 0,
	grainRate = 10, grainSize = 0.2,
	bufRate = 1, bufRtJitter = 0, amp = 0.1,
	panWidth = 0, panCenter = 0|

	var	trig = Select.kr(trigType, [Impulse.kr(grainRate),
			Dust.kr(grainRate)]),
		bufdur = BufDur.kr(buf),
		startsec = start * bufdur,
		pos = Phasor.kr(0, scanRate * ControlDur.ir, startsec,
				end * bufdur, startsec)
			+ TRand.kr(jitter.neg, jitter, trig),
		pan = (TRand.kr(panWidth.neg, panWidth, trig)
			+ panCenter).clip(-1, 1),
		sig;
	bufRtJitter = bufRtJitter.linexp(0, 4, 1, 4);

	sig = TGrains.ar(2, trig, buf,
		rate: bufRate * TExpRand.kr(bufRtJitter.reciprocal,
			bufRtJitter, trig),
		centerPos: pos, dur: grainSize,
		pan: pan, amp: amp);
	Limiter.ar(sig)
}, [#[0, 20, \lin, 1, 0], #[0, 1, \lin, 1],
	nil, nil, #[0.05, 20, \exp], nil,
	#[1, 80, \exp], #[0.01, 1.2, \exp],
	#[0.05, 20, \exp], #[0, 4], \amp,
	nil, \bipolar
]);

So, why is this a rant? It's about the power and superficiality of hype.

What the program does is really simple in the DSP world -- so simple, it's not really worth money. But, give it a clever name ("Oh, it's atomic, is it? Then it must be awesome") and a suggestive image and voilà! It's a must-have.

Hype even extends to free software. Destroy FX's famous "buffer override" effect is a good example. It has nothing to do with overriding any buffers. It just plays a portion of audio too fast, looping it until it's time to move on to the next portion. But no... it's a buffer override, like messing with the guts of your audio system. Isn't that cooler? (Not really. That's another effect that wouldn't be too hard to re-create in SuperCollider.)

I shouldn't kvetch too much. Most electronic musicians don't have my degree of obsessiveness to learn to roll their own DSP (and maybe they finish more music, more quickly than I). A tool like Atomic Cloud makes granular synthesis accessible to a lot more people than are willing to learn SC. That in itself is a good thing. And, Mr. Gersic is not exactly overcharging. But it ain't atomic, and it's very easy to replicate.

Anyway, it was just a moment's crankiness, or perhaps feeling of superiority -- now expanded into several paragraphs and left lying about on the web in perpetuity. Isn't technology just grand?