Requests/Wishlist

[yeeehah]

I just bought this through the MacUpdate Promo... Great.
My wish is to be able to save the images the app creates when I upload my photographs. I love the way your app plays with them and want to use them.
Thanks.
Cool app!

[jonahs]

1. A quick way to return the play position to the start when it is part way through the file

Down key?

2. A way to select an area (rectangle) of the file to process with the operations (e.g. to frequency invert it, etc) rather than the whole file. The could be used to create some very interesting effects (and would also enable <3> below...).

There are a few ways to do this. What I do is make a new layer, make a dot the distance from the x+ y origin then do fill from maxima to bottom, fill from maxima to left. On my mac I mapped these out to shortcuts you could also make a script to do this with windows.

If you use the move tool and drag the layer off the canvas and release for a second photosounder will chop it. So what I do sometimes is duplicate the layer and drag the parts I don't want off canvas leaving just what I do want.

There are some more non-traditional ways, but I have a hard time remembering them.

3. Operations to create a gradient fade from black and also to fade to black (preferably over the period you have selected with the tool in <2>). This would enable us to create smooth fades in and out at the start/end of the files.

Does this show you want you want to do?

[roland_rock]

1. A quick way to return the play position to the start when it is part way through the file

Down key?

Brilliant, thanks! I thought I'd tried all the obvious keys, but missed that one.

I'm off on hols tomorrow morning, but will check out your other advice when I get back, thanks.

[wasi]

I'm going to add the stereo editing request again. It was mentioned a while back but I'd like it in there. What I would see is having the current mono channel in the center and the left and right channels above and below. Ideally you could edit on any channel and transfer your edits (or your edit chain) to the others at any time.

IMO it would be sufficient though to be able to edit only on the 'mono' channel but be able to 'apply' your edits directly to the left and right, being able to adjust parameters before you do so (e.g. more gain on the left).

Yes, I realize the result can be achieved with scripting and the load left/right function, but that is very tedious and you can't hear what you are doing until it's all finished. The way I propose allows you to listen back in mono, then export to stereo, all in the same session.

We need (easier) stereo processing.

[A_SN]

I'm new to Photosounder though I've been aware of the possibilities thanks to Metasynth.

Listening to some of the photos being played made me wonder if it would be possible to play a movie- I'm thinking in terms of a changing image that is played by the line that sweeps across the scene- not sure it's useful for anything but generating sound from movies, and not sure how much pre-computation is required to play the image...

Especially with a flexible time rate, I think that (if it's computationally feasible) this could produce interesting results.

al

Lots of people ask me about videos in Photosounder, which I guess shows that the point of Photosounder is being missed. It's not something that converts visual media into sound, it's a program that uses images to represent/store/manipulate/create sounds. The idea is that the pixels replace the samples as a medium for sound, allowing for more flexibility and greater possibilities in how sounds are created/transformed. Therefore it wouldn't make sense for Photosounder to open videos, because videos are not an image.

However it would make sense if something else turned a video into a single image for Photosounder to load, or more practically if something was made based on the same technology to do what you want it to do. But I don't really see the interest in doing that. I'm already bored of regular images being turned into sound, the more you hear the more they sound the same. I prefer to see Photosounder as a great tool for synthesising new sounds, discovering/applying novel effects to sound or as a powerful tool to process/manipulate sounds. Sadly it appears that I'm failing to get that point across. I need to make more videos I guess.

As for the editing tools, well, quite frankly I think there's tons that needs to be done. Geometrical tools (mostly lines and splines) are definitely needed, I guess selections would help too, I'd also like to take a page from SplineEQ and have a sort of special layer mode where the layer wouldn't be defined by pixels (although it would still be a bunch of pixels in the end) but rather defined by some sort of curve, that would help creating envelope layers used for dynamics (like making fade ins/outs) and equalizers, but also it would be good if we could get things done in the logarithmic domain as opposed to linear with the current operations thing. The problem with the current approach is that it insists that everything is in the time-frequency domain when sometimes what a layer represents (before averaging of some sort) is in something like the frequency-gain domain or the time-gain domain and it fails to make the difference.

I'm going to add the stereo editing request again. It was mentioned a while back but I'd like it in there. What I would see is having the current mono channel in the center and the left and right channels above and below. Ideally you could edit on any channel and transfer your edits (or your edit chain) to the others at any time.

IMO it would be sufficient though to be able to edit only on the 'mono' channel but be able to 'apply' your edits directly to the left and right, being able to adjust parameters before you do so (e.g. more gain on the left).

Yes, I realize the result can be achieved with scripting and the load left/right function, but that is very tedious and you can't hear what you are doing until it's all finished. The way I propose allows you to listen back in mono, then export to stereo, all in the same session.

We need (easier) stereo processing.

I realise that we do, but there is so much that's unrelated to the stereo issue that needs to be done too, I'm just one guy and I can't even develop full time on it.

[wasi]

I'm going to add the stereo editing request again. It was mentioned a while back but I'd like it in there. What I would see is having the current mono channel in the center and the left and right channels above and below. Ideally you could edit on any channel and transfer your edits (or your edit chain) to the others at any time.

IMO it would be sufficient though to be able to edit only on the 'mono' channel but be able to 'apply' your edits directly to the left and right, being able to adjust parameters before you do so (e.g. more gain on the left).

Yes, I realize the result can be achieved with scripting and the load left/right function, but that is very tedious and you can't hear what you are doing until it's all finished. The way I propose allows you to listen back in mono, then export to stereo, all in the same session.

We need (easier) stereo processing.

I realise that we do, but there is so much that's unrelated to the stereo issue that needs to be done too, I'm just one guy and I can't even develop full time on it.

Thanks. I'm just glad:
a) you're still working on Photosounder (As quiet as it had gone here, I was worried I had spent quite a lot of money on something that would be stuck in its current IMO imperfect state), and
b) you see better stereo processing as a requirement within some as yet undefined timeframe.

Just keep chipping away, you're doing great so far. I'll gladly wait as long as it's not abandoned.

[pulsemod]

For a professional audio pipeline there are some features that could be more streamlined. I do a lot of repetitive editing with it and these are some of the things that get in the way:

When saving wav file you have to manually select "wav" as the format as it defaults to pha (photosounder history file). You can accidentally lose work this way if you forget to set it, thinking you are saving the asset itself.

No drag and drop open.

Does not save it out the same bit and sample rate as imported.

No preferences menu for setting default values.

The "reload" window asks "save before closing?" which defaults to yes. And if you select no hoping to back out of the operation it automatically does the reload and you lose your work. If you accidentally select yes you could overwrite an important file. It would make more sense if it asks you "are you sure? unsaved changes will be lost." with a default of no which acts as a cancel. Then it's safer, you can save it where you need to if necessary, and you have a way of backing out too.

Save as window should default to the name of the last saved file or the currently loaded file. Seems weird to have to fill that in every single time you want to save.

Multiple levels of undo not possible.

By the way, I get lots of out of memory crashes. Really have to be careful not to do edits while it is refreshing the spectrogram.

[A_SN]

For a professional audio pipeline there are some features that could be more streamlined. I do a lot of repetitive editing with it and these are some of the things that get in the way:

When saving wav file you have to manually select "wav" as the format as it defaults to pha (photosounder history file). You can accidentally lose work this way if you forget to set it, thinking you are saving the asset itself.

No drag and drop open.

Does not save it out the same bit and sample rate as imported.

No preferences menu for setting default values.

The "reload" window asks "save before closing?" which defaults to yes. And if you select no hoping to back out of the operation it automatically does the reload and you lose your work. If you accidentally select yes you could overwrite an important file. It would make more sense if it asks you "are you sure? unsaved changes will be lost." with a default of no which acts as a cancel. Then it's safer, you can save it where you need to if necessary, and you have a way of backing out too.

Save as window should default to the name of the last saved file or the currently loaded file. Seems weird to have to fill that in every single time you want to save.

Multiple levels of undo not possible.

By the way, I get lots of out of memory crashes. Really have to be careful not to do edits while it is refreshing the spectrogram.

You're right about many things that are lacking. I've thought about this long and hard and the only realistic way any of this will ever be done is if I rewrite Photosounder with Nokia's Qt framework. As it is it's just SDL + platform dependent code (which I'm really uncomfortable with writing, which explains the poor OS integration), so that gets in the way of a lot of things. With Qt I'd be able to quickly expand the GUI and its functionality, also I'd be easily able to make 64-bit builds, which would solve the out of memory issues. Coincidentally Qt 5 is due to being released in November so I guess I'll wait for that. Besides I'll be happy to rewrite it as I have very mixed feelings about the way Photosounder's code base grew and everything that's lacking in the GUI (you can't even input a value in the knobs or rename layers, that sucks).

Just one thing though: "Does not save it out the same bit and sample rate as imported." that's because Photosounder is not an audio editor. If you want to change those you have to set it in the config file. I never thought this would be a problem before.

[Waldbaer]

Hi,
I think the layer support (you might want to delete it from the first post as a wish) is an extremely powerful feature, but it will be even much more powerful if you add import/export capabilities for it. The probably easiest way will be just to allow to import and export single layers as .bmp as you can already do with the whole picture.
Even better might be a possibility to export a multilayered image-file; as a PSD-File you will even be able to keep the modes then, or maybe a multilayered TIFF? Maybe you can think about this...

Even if photosounder has some interesting specialized features (the complete operations menu), Photoshop or similar programs will always have some different ones which might be interesting to combine.

[A_SN]

Hi,
I think the layer support is an extremely powerful feature, but it will be even much more powerful if you add import/export capabilities for it. The probably easiest way will be just to allow to import and export single layers as .bmp as you can already do with the whole picture.
Even better might be a possibility to export a multilayered image-file; as a PSD-File you will even be able to keep the modes then, or maybe a multilayered TIFF? Maybe you can think about this...

Even if photosounder has some interesting specialized features (the complete operations menu), Photoshop or similar programs will always have some different ones which might be interesting to combine.

Totally agree, I'd say an import feature is the single most needed feature. The only problem is what to do when image dimensions are wildly different, I'm not sure what to do about that.

[Waldbaer]

The problem won't occur if you just want to (re-)import a .bmp that you actually exported before to edit it externally.

If you get to importing an image of another size, just resize it automatically (not keeping proportions) and maybe show up a message telling the optimal dimensions and that it was automatically resized. Should be possible, isn't it?

[A_SN]

The problem won't occur if you just want to (re-)import a .bmp that you actually exported before to edit it externally.

If you get to importing an image of another size, just resize it automatically and maybe show up a message telling the optimal dimensions and that it was automatically resized. Should be possible, isn't it?

Yeah, I guess that would be the solution. If you import another sound it's gonna be a mess if the sound is longer though, if you rescale the imported sound it'll go too fast, if you expand the document size to make room for it it'll break the lossless mode, I guess you could crop the imported sound to the size of the document but I have mixed feelings about that.

[Waldbaer]

Oh, I did not even think about importing additional sounds until now... hm, breaking the lossless mode is not fine, of course (well I don't understand why adding silence to a layer should break the lossless mode, but you will, probably. ). Maybe you could just let the user decide: Insert a message offering to crop the audio to import, resize it without the lossless mode on that layer or just cancel the import.

I'm actually wondering how PS works internally using the layers - at the moment they are just visual, aren't they? If you offer to import sounds, you'll necessarily have to implement some kind of track management, e.g. lossless-mode on/off for each layer separately, sound and picture based layers, won't you? My idea for the moment was just to add an import/export feature for visual layers - probably this is much less work for you but will already offer many creative possibilities by bringing the possibilities of external image editing to mulitlayer-projects. And if someone wants to import another sound file, he might even workaround it by opening the file to import all alone at first, exporting it as .bmp and then importing it into his main project...

[sl1914]

Normally I'm not interested in the sound produced from the whole image. Just part of it.

So: would it be possible to add loop start/end markers, like sample players normally have? These would control which part of the image is used to create sound and it would be used also when saving the image.

This way I wouldn't need to load the output wav file to a sample editor and crop the sound. And since the sound changes depending on the image, it's much easier to find the correct loop start/end based on the source image - since the waveform usually looks like monotonous noise in a sample editor.

IMO this feature would be super useful.

[Waldbaer]

This one sounds very useful to me, too. We're looking forward to upcoming updates!