[chuck-users] Audio Range and Zero-crossings, Performance, Hashes and Future DIrections

[joerg piringer]

Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
> Hi list,
> I'm new here. I'm a 20 something sight-impaired programmer and musician from 
> Finland. I've got experience using analogs both virtual and real and know 
> how to build Reaktor patches as well as program in Java, Perl and C. Now 
> I've picked up the basics of ChucK and read through the PDF manual that 
> comes with the program. Looks good and certainly a great deal more 
> accessible than recent versions of Reaktor if you're using magnification and 
> a screen reader program. I've got a flurry of questions I'll ask here.
> 
> ChucK says it is:
>  chuck version: 1.2.0.7b (dracula)
>    exe target: microsoft win32
> 
> 1. What's the range of the audio float datatype and what would be the best 
> way to detect zero crossings? My aim is to write a simple app that counts 
> the samples in the low and high phases of a pulse wave and prints out the 
> pulse width whenever it changes. If I can also get MIDi input into the app 
> it would be quite easy to determine how pulse width in percentages changes 
> as the function of the pulse width knob in my virtual and real analogs, 
> whose exact values are not documented.
> 
> Here's some prototypical code (this is my first real chucK script):
> 
> Code:
> 100::ms => dur blockSize; // Processing resolution.
> until(adc.last() < 0) // Measure low-phase first.
>    blockSize => now;
> // SAmple counters:
> 0 => int positive;
> 0 => int negative;
> while(true)
> {
>    adc.last() => float sample;
>    if(sample > 0)
>       ++positive;
>    else if(sample < 0)
>    {
>       ++negative;
>       if(positive > 0) // Measured at least one cycle.
>          <<< "Width: ", 100 * negative / (negative + positive) >>>;
>       0 => positive => negative; // Reset counters.
>    } // else if
>    // Ignore the pure 0 value.
>    blockSize => now;
> } // while
> End code.
> 
> However, when I run this, the app doesn't ever seem to get past the until 
> loop. I'm assuming here that samples are floats or doubles from -1 to 1 as 
> in VST, as I didn't find the range in the manual. Is this correct? IF not, 
> it's no wonder the code won't work, <smile>. Of course the rather grainy 
> test processing rate, ten times a sec, affects matters greatly but I don't 
> ever seem to get negative sample values even in arbitrary audio. The adc and 
> dac modules do work. IF I patch them together and record from the wave input 
> I get a delayed copy of the input in the output I guess this is the audio 
> equivalent of "cat".


i didn't look too closely to your code but what you seem to have no 
statement like:
adc a => blackhole;
or
adc a => dac d;
at the beginning. so in fact adc isn't working at all because it's not 
in the ugen chain.

best
joerg


-- 
http://joerg.piringer.net
http://www.transacoustic-research.com
http://www.iftaf.org
http://www.vegetableorchestra.org/