Hello,
It seems that better communication on this subject would be appreciated (AudioSculpt 4 — On its Release and New Features) so I’ll do my best to explain my point of view (but keep in mind that’s my personal opinion and it doesn’t necessarily reflect the official Ircam position).
AudioSculpt 3 is a standalone application built around a set of audio engines integrated as command-line tools executables (SuperVP, PM2, etc.). So AudioSculpt 3 is essentially a graphical application but unfortunately, it is based on an Apple development kit that has been deprecated for more than 10 years. Perhaps Ircam could have invested means to update the application earlier, perhaps not, (I don’t know) but the fact is that it has not been done and that’s a fact, and there is nothing to do about it. But now it becomes critical because the application is not deprecated anymore but it becomes unusable. So, can we consider updating AudioSculpt?
Updating the AudioSculpt 3 means rewriting the entire application because even if the audio engines are still theoretically compatible with recent operating systems and machines, the application is essentially graphical (and this part is not). And just trying to replace the old graphical code with a new one that does exactly the same things doesn’t really make sense because there were many bugs that must be fixed, original propositions that must be updated (or even removed because the approach is effectively deprecated), audio engines that must also be updated, etc. We don’t want to reproduce the exact same application with what is unwanted and bugged otherwise we will surely be in the same situation in 5 years. Furthermore, even if many approaches were great in AudioSculpt 3 and are still great, there are many things that don’t fit the current expectation in terms of user interface and interaction, otherwise, even if some of the “historical” users continue to use the application, there will be less and less interest over the years and that would lead to the abandon of the development. So, creating AudioSculpt 4 is not trivial and would require many years of works.
Ircam is a research center (beyond many other aspects), continuously offering new tools and we don’t have the development mean of big companies and in this context, sometimes, it becomes impossible to maintain applications such as AudioSculpt. Of course, if we could we would do AudioSculpt 4 but it’s not. So, based on this assertion we try to find approaches that are more adapted to our means. Partiels, for instance, is a first proposition that tries to compensate for the deprecation of the analysis part of AudioSculpt. This is a work in progress and many things will change and will be improved in the future and even it is not mainly intended to sound transformation, you can already use the results in OM, Pure Data, Max, etc. We are also working on a second proposition to compensate for the deprecation of the effect part of AudioSculpt (it doesn’t mean that it will not integrate analyses to control these effects). We try an approach that would be faster in terms of development and more dynamic (for future development). And hopefully, we will be able to present the first demo soon.
We all would like to have a solution to AudioSculpt obsolescence and we work hard on it. As a user, the best you can do to help is to share your creative workflow, not only the tools that you use but also how you use them and why. This way we can try to create new tools, not exactly like AudioSculpt but nevertheless be adapted to your need.
AudioSculpt est mort ! Vive AudioSculpt !
