Snd mix dialog

[Tobias Kunze]

X doesn't have a generic mixer as far as I know, but there are
several free mixers on the sgi, some of which might probably
be easily ported to linux.

Hey, I just realize I'm a mixophobe!  Thinking back, I believe I've
never seriously used a mixer at all...  Always struck me as a real
crude tool, somewhat like shifting the voices in a Bach Fugue,
hoping it'll make it sound better.

But, theoretically, scriptability would be important for me.  RT
is highly scriptable, but it's processing algorithms seem a bit
inferior to me (ie, speed-oriented).  Fasmix is programmable, too.
But both lack a graphical representation of (at least) the waveform.

SGI Mix is scriptable and has a most straightforward GUI, i.e.,
shifting works graphically, pan, aux and vol faders may be applied
or programmed at any point as well as variables set.  It allows not,
however, to reference regions among tracks.  It shares soundfiles,
but not subregions of soundfiles.  SGI Mix is limited to 8 "tracks",
each of which may hold as many sounds as you wish.  It has an overall
time limit of i believe 20 minutes, but it's easy to hack in the
sources, a matter of 2 lines if i remember right.  And, yes, it comes
with sources.

I could go on and on, but let's not forget Michael Edward's nifty
artimix program, a real-time mixer with real-time keyboard and
midi control and no GUI!  Then, there is midisynth(1) on the SGI's,
which may be used as a midi-controlled soundfile mixer (just drop
soundfile icons in the channel drop boxes and start hacking away at
your keyboard).

Last, but not least, irix 6.3 comes with an unlimited-track mixer,
soundtracker(1), written in part by ccrma's own paul wienc??awski
(sorry, forgot the exact name), which has it all: gui, real-time
graphics playback (scrolling at any zoom), region definition, region
linking, of course all sorts of mouse operations, envelopes, etc.
Quite similar to digidesigns ProTools on the Mac, which I believe
is still the "industry standard" mixing environment for post-production.
Of course, soundtracker is not as powerful as protools, but it's
free and, I believe, hard to beat if you start from scratch.  They
put about 10 man-years into it.

What i personally would really really like to see is an orchestra
compiler for clm!  That is, a pre-compiled clm "super" instrument,
that can be called from an interpreted script, like csound does.