Composers Desktop Project

a formerly 250 dollar software program is now free

not real time but sounds amazing

for osx and pc

 

http://www.composersdesktop.com/cdpsystem.html

owned it for 5 years and still can't figure out how to get anything cool out of it

What does this do actually? The site is hard to get anything from....

  On 4/21/2014 at 11:05 PM, John Ehrlichman said:

owned it for 5 years and still can't figure out how to get anything cool out of it

 

exactly the same here. I saw Trevor Wishart live and heard him do a talk about it afterwards, was amazing (and I normally don't get on with the academic electroacoustic scene but some Wishart's stuff is actually good). I think he's the only guy in the world who knows how it works, allegedly Richard Divine likes it too. So I guess that makes two.

https://soundcloud.com/pan_recs/trevor-wishart-imago-pan-12

He did this using it (back in the early days of computer music - I think he was processing sound files on an atari or something)

I had a copy of this at Uni. Can't remember what version, but my lecturer was mates with Wishart so had great insight into how to use the bastard. All I can remember was the interface being the worst thing I'd ever experienced but I did manage to get some very good results, especially from the spectral analysis. Kinda like a very early izotope prototype. Might have to get this and see if the muscle memory kicks in.

  On 4/21/2014 at 11:28 PM, slightlydrybeans said:

What does this do actually? The site is hard to get anything from....

it's an ever evolving set of sound design and sound processing tools, to be used offline (non-real time processing), which incorporate some unique DSP algorithms to process sound files in interesting ways. could be used on individual samples or an entire track or composition. a lot of it is not GUI based, so not exactly user friendly, but there are GUI front ends for the PC version available. Edited April 22, 2014 by 2WV

theres two gui's Soundshaper which is pretty easy to grasp and Soundloom which was written by Wishart and i agree is very difficult to grasp. They both have the same features. (i think). I have a feeling soundloom has some extra shit but i cant figure the fucking thing out.

 

osx has only soundloom.

 

they really never did a proper help manual

Edited April 22, 2014 by marf

Thanks for the heads up, acquired a copy of version 5 years ago for doing a review. Been using some of the transform functions in Renoise sample editor using a lua front-end. Might be a nice project to create a dedicated Renoise tool for all functions.

Ugliness on the interface/front end is usually a reflection of the underlying code. And after a quick look at the source, that certainly seems to be the case here. I want to say something nice but I'm afraid it's the epitome of everything that's wrong with academic music software

All i wanted to do with it was a sinusoidal breakdown of a sound and/or a spectral crossfade/morph, basically trying to see if I can get by without a Kyma doing the same stuff.

From what I remember it didn't operate in real-time and since the options and settings weren't intuitive I ended up outputting a lot of garbagey sounding or just 'wrong' sounds that weren't what I was looking for at all. I'm sure with the right guidance once could make cool stuff with it.

looks like some interesting tools

i think rich was using cdp a lot in the making of drukqs. you know that crazy voice at the beginning of Afx 237 V7? that is a CDP process.

  On 4/23/2014 at 2:24 AM, anigbrowl said:

Ugliness on the interface/front end is usually a reflection of the underlying code. And after a quick look at the source, that certainly seems to be the case here. I want to say something nice but I'm afraid it's the epitome of everything that's wrong with academic music software

 

DISH PLZ

 

  On 4/23/2014 at 6:28 AM, marf said:

i think rich was using cdp a lot in the making of drukqs. you know that crazy voice at the beginning of Afx 237 V7? that is a CDP process.

 

CITATION NEEDEDED?

ill dl cdp again and walk you through it. watch this space

I made a thread about this on the Renoise forum, trying to get an able scripter enthusiastic in creating a dedicated CDP tool, and first baby step test-tool has emerged for the filterbank 1 function ( http://forum.renoise.com/index.php?/topic/41882-tool-idea-cdp-lua-tool/ ). There are so many CDP processes though, it would be impossible to incorporate all in one tool, hopefully the phasevocoding / morphing stuff will eventually see the light.

  On 4/25/2014 at 12:48 AM, Ascdi said:

 

  On 4/23/2014 at 6:28 AM, marf said:

i think rich was using cdp a lot in the making of drukqs. you know that crazy voice at the beginning of Afx 237 V7? that is a CDP process.

 

CITATION NEEDEDED?

 

 

distort repeat2

 

Results of distort.exe execution with repeat2 function

Dry -> 16 -c16 -> 4 -c50

This process repeats wavecycles without timestretching

 

Then overall result was processed with repeat function (timestretch by repeating wavecycles)

 

distort repeat

The wavecycle stuff was always the best thing about it IMHO, you can get a lot of the spectral stuff out of other programs. I just wish it didn't suffer from that interface, everytime I sit down to try and master it I jack it in pretty quickly.

Ha, sounds great! I love it. Can’t wait for those mp3s to pop up in my iTunes library again.

thanks telefunken., saved me the effort. thats it

CDP was written to do stuff that couldnt be real time. But i think it was written in the early 90's . I wonder how much could be ported over to something like Kyma or some real time plugins.

  On 4/25/2014 at 12:48 AM, Ascdi said:

 

  On 4/23/2014 at 2:24 AM, anigbrowl said:

Ugliness on the interface/front end is usually a reflection of the underlying code. And after a quick look at the source, that certainly seems to be the case here. I want to say something nice but I'm afraid it's the epitome of everything that's wrong with academic music software

 

DISH PLZ

 

  On 4/23/2014 at 6:28 AM, marf said:

i think rich was using cdp a lot in the making of drukqs. you know that crazy voice at the beginning of Afx 237 V7? that is a CDP process.

 

CITATION NEEDEDED?

 

yes.in the super collider list, he(eric hard jams) said something about it being the shit, that he got a pc just to have cdp

that was way before drukqs tho.

heres the archive if you feel like searching :)

http://www.audiosynth.com/files/sc-users-archive/

also trevor wishart's book "audible design", I think it was writen specifically for this software. its well tasty!

Edited April 29, 2014 by rekosn

  On 4/26/2014 at 7:51 PM, marf said:

CDP was written to do stuff that couldnt be real time. But i think it was written in the early 90's . I wonder how much could be ported over to something like Kyma or some real time plugins.

with todays processing power I'd be surprised if things exclusive to kyma and CDP *couldn't* be done on in real-time on a new fast computer. I think people just haven't tried to push algorithms or existing available spectral processing code as far as Kyma and a few others have.

For those with Renoise 3 and the latest CDP package installed, there is progress on the CDP tool enabling you to process sample content from Renoises sample editor.

 

Thanks to the hard work of Afta, we can now create and add our own definitions, I've done a bunch of basic stuff that still need fine-tuning because min and max settings of process parameters are not always well documented, latest tool update here;

 

http://forum.renoise.com/index.php?/topic/41882-tool-idea-cdp-lua-tool/page__view__findpost__p__316552

 

Still in baby shoes, as all the stuff that needs additional files specifying variation over time (breakpoint, envelopes, analysis files, all the spectral cool stuff et cetera) have yet to be tackled, but the future is looking good.