[Audacity-devel] Real-time effects stacks

[Jorge R. <jro...@ma...>]

There have been two things I've always wanted out of Audacity that I could
never get. The first one is a way to cut out a section of music while
leaving the rest of it undisturbed. That was implemented recently, "Split
Delete." (Should be default behavior in my opinion, deleting a section of
sound shouldn't move other stuff around. But anyways!) The other one was
real-time effects stacks, or the ability to apply effects non-destructively,
realtime, during play. This transforms Audacity from a powerful sound
editing tool into a multitrack recording studio.

So, I hear that 1.3.5 is coming out and then is the time to start putting
new stuff in Audacity and it's important to me that this to be one of them,
so I'm pretty sure I'm willing to spare a couple of hours of my week to make
sure that this feature is part of the next Audacity release.

Questions. At a high level, what would be required to get this feature
working? Audacity already supports applying effects, they just need to be
applied during playback instead of immediately. I think you would need a UI
for managing effects, and the order that they are processed in, and a
mechanism for controlling the effects. The current dialogs that do this can
probably be reused. And then of course, the code for applying the effects in
realtime instead of destructively. Can someone elaborate on exactly what
needs to happen? What I specifically want to know is even a vague estimate
of how many man hours is this going to be? I've done things tangentally
related to this, but not really the same thing, so who is going to help me
when I invariably run into a wall?

PS. CVS?

-- 
Jorge Rodriguez
Matrieya Studios, LLC
Email: jro...@ma...
Phone: (919) 757-3066