Amber For Linux

Amber is a flexible tool for granular synthesis. This synthesis technique is becoming more and more popular in the computer music world, and the developers felt that the current tools available to do granular synthesis were not as flexible as one might hope.

Granular synthesis is a basic sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale. It is often based on the same principles as sampling but often includes analog technology. The samples are not used directly however, they are split in small pieces of around 1 to 50 ms in length, or the synthesized sounds are very short. These small pieces are called grains. Multiple grains may be layered on top of each other all playing at different speed, phase and volume.

The result is no single tone, but a soundscape, often a cloud, that is subject to manipulation in a way unlike any natural sound and also unlike the sounds produced by most other synthesis techniques. By varying the waveform, envelope, duration, spatial position, and density of the grains many different sounds can be produced.

The result is usable as music, sound effects or as raw material for further processing by other synthesis or DSP effects. The range of effects that can be produced include amplitude modulation, time stretching, stereo or multichannel scattering, random reordering, disintegration and morphing.

What's New in This Release:

� complete rewrite of the man granulator code -- it's now much shorter and easier to understand. Also fixed a problem where the first grain got written in the wrong position in the output stream. � kind of fixed convolution code -- it seems to work but gives very wierd results. � now, instead of writing the output file in chunks, amber will hold all of the output samples in memory until processing is complete, and then write the file out. this will allow me to add some normalizing code, and other post-processing. � removed the pan options, operating under the assumption that anyone who is going to use this program knows how to apply panning. This may return later in the form of some kind of stereo-ization of the final output.