Post the minor inconveniences you've met in Photosounder, the kind you wouldn't bother to write an e-mail about. This is about smoothing things out, good software can never be too polished.

For example, on the Mac version I recently found out that if you paint outside the image's area it acts as if you had dropped the click. That's kind of an inconvenience (I'm working on fixing it atm).

Anything else?

Hi,
I have a problem with the mp3 import. The required dll is in Photosounders (demo) directory _and_ system32 under Win 7 64Bit, but there's still the error Message that mp3s couldn't be imported because of the missing dll... What's to do to fix this, please?

Are you 100% sure you have the right DLL file?

Yes, I'm sure, please see here for a screenshot:
http://de.tinypic.com/r/2cp3tra/5

btw: Win7 64Bit...

Mmmh, must be because I've linked to the 32 bit DLL. You might want to try that one http://www.mpg123.de/download/win64/mpg123-1.10.1-x86-64.zip

I tried it. Sorry, no chance, cannot open Mp3s, same error message any time.

I am having the same exact mp3 problem also: Win7 64bit with the 64bit mpg123 .dll in both the system folder and photosounder's root. Its been almost half a year since this was originally posted!

Frustrating that this is still an issue

Can you (or anyone else who has the problem for that matter) download the following build, just run it, quit it and copy here the contents of logfile.txt please?

http://photosounder.com/misc/photosounder-1.8.1b-0624_win.zi p


You mean 3 months, right?

Hi again,
your latest version works fine with MP3 under Win7 Home Premium 64Bit Thanks a lot. Sound manipulation possibilities with mp3 are really cool, it's a fantastic tool.

But a few more problems I have found anyway: Program doesn't remind last position of it's window. Every time it starts it's on the top of the desktop and for users with the taskbar on the top (like MacOS) that's frustrating.
And when I open i.e. a 33MB mp3-file (28 min ca. 160kBit vbr) Photosounder crashes with error message 'can't allocate more memory' or so). With 4GB of RAM? Memory usage is fantastic: 650MB for a ca. 6 min mp3-file with ca. 170kbit. Virtually everyone need more then 2GB of memory with every windows version for Photosounder. I think that's really lavish... BTW: With my AMD Phenom X4 2.2GHz isn't much fun to work. Manipulation tools need all the power of all 4 processors a lot of time while working. I.e rectangle tool is not comfortably useable with that processor, mouse cursor hangs often. That's a pitty.

Greats
Jens

Well.. glad it's "solved", but I did nothing for that to happen...


Ah, I never thought of that, I've just added it to my todo list.



Yeah.. do you realise that a 28 minute sound is going to generate 168,000 x 571 pixels image? That's 96 MP if you prefer. Each image buffer is going to be 366 MB, and there's quite a few of them (one for each layer, one for the mix of all layers, an undo buffer, one to store the original analysis of the sound (for use in lossless mode), and another one to store internal operations, although I suppose I could get rid of this one when it's not used, but it might cause fragmentation...), plus 283 MB for the sound buffer, plus another 283 MB to store an copy of the original sound for lossless mode use. In all for your 28 minutes sound that's 2.06 GB for just these buffers, there's a few more (but they're smaller). Given that we're using an address space of 4 GB that's not really a surprise it wouldn't work, given all the fragmentation and all that. I know that's technical, but that's the explanation of why it's taking so much memory.

So the same calculation for a 6 minute sound gives you 453 MB, just for the necessary image and sound buffers. Now perhaps I could dump some of those to a temporary file, I'd have to look into that, but I don't think it'd make things faster..

I really don't have any idea why you'd want to open a 28 minute sound, but if really have to well you can reduce the size of the image buffers (which represent about 75% of the memory usage in the preceding calculations) by changing the settings in config.txt. For example you can lower the pixels_per_second and bands_per_octave settings to achieve something acceptable.

Like I said I can't really see what you'd want to do with a 28 minute sound in Photosounder, except perhaps looking at it? The only times I ever open a file a few minutes long it's to look at it. So perhaps I should make a dedicated viewer that would be devoid of all the unnecessary buffers and that would play back the original sound (so you wouldn't have to wait for resynthesis)? I guess it wouldn't be too hard to make, I'd just have to gut Photosounder out for anything not needed, and for your 28 minute sound it'd take 'only' about 650 MB instead of 2.06 GB, perhaps even less. The upside is that you wouldn't have to wait for the whole thing to resynth to play it either. Let me know what you think about it, if you or other people are interested I could do that and even open-source the result (since it'd be free anyway and wouldn't have much critical code in it).

This being said, except for viewing, I only work on sounds less than a minute long when I have something precise to do on them, and so it works fine for me (even though I only run with 2 GB of ram). Like if I work on a 10-second long sound, even with 10 layers it only takes about 85 MB which is fine (192 MB for 42 seconds and 10 layers).

And you have issues with your Quad core CPU? I have a Core 2 Duo that runs at 1.6 GHz and I'm quite fine. The manipulation tools don't use 4 cores btw, they do their operations in one thread and are displayed (updated to the screen) in parallel by another thread, so when you're drawing around it shouldn't use more than 2 cores. It only uses all cores when synthesising, but it stops doing that as soon as you use your drawing tools. This being said, if you tried using something like the rectangle tool on a 6-minute sound it must have looked choppy. The reason for that is that would be that you're viewing and editing a 36,000 x 571 picture all at once. If it's not the case and that you were editing a smaller portion of your sound/image then I have no idea what could have made it unsmooth. Although actually for the rectangle tool specifically there's a lot of constant copying between buffers so even if you zoomed in it might suffer (as for every time it updates the rectangle first it has to copy the whole undo buffer into the current layer buffer..). Yeah we're not just dealing with big number crunching but also lots of memory transfers, so nothing good really comes out of dealing with huge images/sounds.

tl;dr please tell me what you need to open 6+ minute-long sounds for so I can try to see how to satisfy your needs.

I realize this topic has been dormant for some time, but I was looking for some info on this same memory allotment issue, and found this post.

I have to say, what with the many possibilities for sound experimentation that Photosounder extols on the website, it's kind of surprising that someone would say something like "I don't know why you would want to..." After all, why would anyone want to convert a picture to audio or vice versa in the first place?

Why would I or anyone else want to open long files in Photosounder? For the same reasons anyone would want to open short files. To experiment with them. Flip them upside down and backwards and see how they sound. Mess with the spectrum and harmonic distributions. Filter out some noise with gamma tools.

I myself just tried to open and manipulate a 2 minute soundfile, and though it opened, and would eventually play, any attempt to alter the sound in any way would get the same memory allocation error. By contrast, I can open and manipulate an hour-long sound file in Sound Forge and conduct several different processes and, if need be, undo them. In Sound Forge, at least, I know there's a scratch disc area set that handles data too large for my 2 GB of RAM. I'm patient; I can wait for SF to process a one-hour file, and I'd be willing to wait for Photosounder too, as long as I knew it wasn't going to just die before finishing its task.

Even if writing to a scratch disc or some other method of handling large files is out of the question for some reason, it would at least be nice if Photosounder would not just crash if it reaches its limit, or better yet, would pop up a message to say "sorry, can't do that" before committing to some process it's unable to handle...

OK, I guess I can add 'scratch disk' to my impossibly long todo list. Just don't hold your breath for it though, I have a lot of things to fix!

I'm late to this thread but 64-bit support would cure more ills than a scratch disk. I have 16GB of ram in my Mac Pro so 28min files would be no problem

Matt

Agreed, I should focus on that.