Code Log

Decided to take a little break from developing Minim and make something with it instead. I made a synth that uses the positions of particles in a simulation to change the frequency and pan position of several oscillators. It comes in two flavors: mono and poly.

Well, I accomplished one of my two goals and finished writing the Minim manual. Hopefully it is clear and will be a useful reference for people. I wasn’t able to push out a new release because of holiday parties, distractions from other projects, and so forth.

Some good news for Minim development, however, is that I finally got around to setting up my PC to dual boot Ubuntu and Windows XP, so I’ll be developing primarily in Linux and then testing things back in Windows. I have already discovered that Linux is pretty tetchy, has latency issues, and is just generally not as great for audio. I have an idea for how to solve the latency issue, but it will require pretty significant recoding. I may just release a new version of Minim within the next month to make some small API changes available and then push dealing with the latency issue into the following release. I’m going to try to be better about semi-regular releases so that when people send me bugs I deal with them quickly and then release a new version.

Man, been a long time. I used to be annoyed by people who release tools like Minim and then leave them undeveloped for long stretches of time with nary a peep about how things are going or when they plan to release a new version. I was even more annoyed when documentation was missing or incomplete. No longer! I have become one of those people! It makes me a bit sad but at the same time a full-time job plus a social life really eats up most of the hours in a day.

Here is a promise I hope to keep:

Before the year is out I will finish the Minim Manual and release a new version of the library, incorporating a couple fixes people have sent me and also adding a little bit of new functionality.

I’m very happy to announce the release of Minim 1.1!

If you’ve been using Minim 1.0, there are some important changes you need to be aware of:

• AudioFileIn is now AudioPlayer.
• AudioClip is now AudioSnippet.
• To get an AudioSnippet you use Minim.loadSnippet(String).
• AudioFileOut is now AudioRecorder.
• To get an AudioRecorder you use Minim.createRecorder(Recordable, String, boolean)
• Additionally, the methods of AudioRecorder are ever so slightly different than those of AudioFileIn.

Another major change from 1.0 is the inclusion of a bunch of Interfaces that define library functionality. Essentially what I’ve done is defined how everything in the library should behave and then written an implementation of that spec. This is why createRecorder takes Recordable as the first argument and not an AudioInput or other concrete class. The use of Interfaces shouldn’t break any of your existing code because I used the existing methods of Minim as the starting point for the Interfaces.

I fixed a host of bugs relating to mp3 playback for this release. They should behave exactly like WAV and AU files now. There are many more examples now, one for each method of each Interface that defines the functionality of Minim classes. Examples are organized by Interface, rather than by concrete class, hopefully this isn’t too confusing for people.

Please let me know if you have any problems or questions!

I was recently motivated to revisit Minim when I got a note about it from Casey Reas, one of the initiators of Processing. Man oh man did I revisit it. The implementation details went through two waves of refactoring, but I think I’ve gotten it to a place that I’m happy with. I’m only incrementing the version number by .1 because I haven’t added any new features. I just changed the names of a couple public classes, made all the implementation details package private so that they don’t clog up the Javadoc, and fixed some bugs relating to mp3 playback.

Additionally, the API is now defined by several interfaces, which opens up the possibility for people to write their own implementation of a file reader, for example. I’m not sure why anybody would actually go to the trouble of doing that, but the possibility exists, nonetheless. Defining the API in terms of interfaces helped me a great deal with standardizing the methods of different public classes that can do similiar things (like applying effects to an audio stream).

I hope to do a release this coming weekend, but it depends on how quickly I can whip the examples into shape. But do keep an eye out!

It’s here, the first release of my audio library for Processing: Minim.

Here are some of the cool features:

• Released under the GPL, source is included in the full distribution.
• AudioFileIn: Mono and Stereo playback of WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, and MP3 files.
• AudioFileOut: Mono and Stereo audio recording either buffered or direct to disk.
• AudioInput: Mono and Stereo input monitoring.
• AudioOutput: Mono and Stereo sound synthesis.
• AudioSignal: A simple interface for writing your own sound synthesis classes.
• Comes with all the standard waveforms, a pink noise generator and a white noise generator. Additionally, you can extend the Oscillator class for easy implementation of your own periodic waveform.
• AudioEffect: A simple interface for writing your own audio effects.
• Comes with low pass, high pass, band pass, and notch filters. Additionally, you can extend the IIRFilter class for easy implementation of your own IIR filters.
• Easy to attach signals and effects to AudioInputs and AudioOutputs. All the mixing and processing is taken care of for you.
• Provides an FFT class for doing spectrum analysis.
• Provides a BeatDetect class for doing beat detection.

Visit the download page, then take a look at the Quickstart Guide or dive right into the Javadocs.