CLAM at LAC 2009 and WWW 2009

Several nice CLAM related presentations has been given in conferences during last month. At the Linux Audio Conference in Parma, we presented an article on Blender-CLAM integration for real-time 3D audio (paper, slides, and video available at the link) and we also gave a workshop on CLAM app and plugin prototyping features. At the WWW2009 in Madrid, we presented an article on the new web services based extractors for Annotator and the data source aggreation interface also some videos of the presentation and demos are available featuring data sources aggregation and live chord extraction from youtube videos.

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Google Summer of Code 2009 Warming Up

GSoC 2009

Google Summer of Code 2009 is warming up. We still don’t know whethe CLAM will be hosted again in this program. But, in any case, we really encourage you to get involved in the program.

If you have doubts, we recommend you take a look at the following video.

And, where to follow? Take a look at this ToDo List for GSoC 2009 and of course, read the program FAQ.

New Domain: clam-project.org

CLAM has moved to a new home: clam-project.org We also changed the wiki URL scheme.

Home: http://clam-project.org/
Planet: http://clam-project.org/planet
Wiki: http://clam-project.org/wiki
Testfarm: http://clam-project.org/testfarm

And last but not least we moved the subversion server to the new domain and we changed some repository names. You can easily migrate existing subversion sandboxes by using the following command:

‘svn switch –relocate [old-svn-root] [new-svn-root] [sandbox]

You can get the svn-root with ‘svn info [sandbox]’ and the new locations for the repositories are:
clam: http://clam-project.org/clam
clam-test-data: http://clam-project.org/clam_data
clam-oldapps: http://clam-project.org/clam_oldapps
clam-web: http://clam-project.org/clam_web
efficiencyguardian: http://clam-project.org/efficiencyguardian

Thousands thanks to the MTG and the IUA for hosting CLAM resources for so long after not being an official MTG project. And special thanks to Jordi Funollet, the MTG sysop, who has helped us to do the migration and responded to all our weird support petitions during those three years 😉

The CLAM Team.

CLAM 1.3.0, the Shooting Flying Plugins release

The CLAM team enraptured to announce the 1.3.0 release of CLAM, the C++ framework for audio and music,
code name The Shooting of the Flying Plugins release.

Highlights of this release are:

• NetworkEditor automatically generates and compiles a LADSPA plugin containing the network you are editing. CLAM also provides a new simple API to code that by hand yourself.
• More FAUST integration into network editor: edit faust code, compile, reload, view the svg diagrams (Natanael Olaiz GSoC)
• Lots of usability enhancements on the NetworkEditor: cut&paste, context menus to connect ports, keyboard shortcuts, default double click actions, and a processing tree filter (Natanael Olaiz GSoC)
• Annotator has also enhanced its functionality (Wang Jun GSoC):
  • You can build a project that aggregates content from several extractors
  • Extractors may have a config file
  • Extractors can write back data (useful if the extractor is a database of webservice and needs to upload modifications)
• New ProgressControl widget and paired AudioFileMemoryLoader processing to support seeking (Pawel Bartkiewicz GSoC)
• A bunch of new 3D spatialization processings from CI Barcelona Media audio research group.
• Scripts and graphical front-end to generate a native CLAM plugin project from scratch.
• Experimental Python bindings (still just-for-hackers install procedure)
• TickExtractor example is compiling again (many thanks to Amaury Hazan from MTG-UPF)
• Development deployment for Windows native compilation using MinGW (Wang Jun GSoC)

And a lot of small nice features and fixes you will appreciate for sure.
Source and binary packages for different platforms are available at the CLAM download page.

See also: development screenshots, the CHANGELOG, and the version migration guide.

We are very excited on what next releases promise us. Some ongoing work:

• Generating other types of network based plugins and programs (LV2, JACK, VST…),
• Subnetworks (Natanael Olaiz GSoC)
• Improved OSC support, 3D scene descriptors parametrization receivers processings and Blender exporter to the spatialization processing choreographer. (Natanael Olaiz GSoC – related blogging)
• Typed controls (Francisco Tufro GSoC)
• A new musician-oriented standalone chord extraction application (Pawel Bartkiewicz GSoC)

CLAMs GSoC 08 Projects Announced

We are very happy to announce the final list of this year’s projects in the Google Summer of Code. We have been extremely fortunate to have a large number of great students apply for CLAM this year and we are confident that the 5 projects outlined below will have a huge impact on the project and the CLAM “family”:

Natanael Olaiz UNQ, Argentina
“Network scalability and Blender integration”
This is a two sided project. The first part will improve the usability of CLAM networks allowing users to hierarchically embed networks as a processing units. The second part consists in developing a set of Blender plugins and CLAM networks to drive audio spacialization based on direct
sound from Blender 3D geometries.

Yushen Han (Indiana University, US)
“Real-time woodwind instrument synthesizer using SMS models”
The project consists in building a real-time synthesizer based on CLAM processing plugins, using SMS models, allowing flexible sound timber manipulation. This project is a continuation to Greg Kellum’s 2007 GSoC project.

Francisco Tufro (UBA, Argentina)
“MIDI Implementation for Network Editor”
This project is both about developing all the needed and most common MIDI processings and also about doing all the required refactorings to the Framework in order to achieve this (i.e. Typed Controls).

Pawel Bartkiewicz (AGH University, Poland)
“Standalone chord extractor application”
This project is about adapting CLAM’s chord extraction technology into an standalone application focusing on usability for instrument players. This project will integrate existing visual and processing components and it will have impact on the interaction between realtime and offline CLAM components.

Wang Jun (Chinese Academy of Science, China)
“AnnMerger-to stand on the shoulders of the masses”
This project goal is add into Annotator the ability of combining several sources of several kinds (webservice, database, files, extractors) into a single project. Secondary goals are providing new data sources and polishing the program workflow.

Read here for more details on the projects:

CLAM in GSoC 2008!

We are glad to announce that 2008 summer is also going to be a Summer of Code for CLAM. Google just announced the list of mentoring organizations for GSoC 2008 and CLAM is in it!

Now we seek smart students who enjoy coding free software so that they can earn some bucks for the summer. Last year, GSoC 2007 was a very fun and productive experience and we are willing to repeat it. Take a look at the CLAM GSoC 2008 wiki page for more information on how to apply and some sample ideas for projects.

We are waiting for you!

CLAM 1.2, the GSoCket plugged-in release

We are jubilous to announce CLAM 1.2 “GSoCket plugged-in release”. We had to wait for some months to make this release as we had to redeploy the multiplatform release infrastructure. Thus, the feature buffer of this release is pretty full. It incorporates both, the results of the Summer of Code students work and the involvement of David and Pau with the crew at Barcelona Media Foundation Audio Research Line.

We want to thank the involvement of GSoC students Hernan Hordiales, Bennet Kolasinsky, Greg Kellum, Andreas Calvo, Roman Goj and Abe Kazemzadeh, Google Inc, and Barcelona Media audio lab members for their precious involvement in CLAM.

A summarized list of changes follows. See also the CHANGES files for details, or the development screenshots for a visual guided tour. As usual binary packages for Windows, MacOSX and several flavors of Linux are available to download.

Summary of changes:

The most exciting feature is the new plugin system (acalvo) which enables third party algorithms to be distributed separately
from the core binaries. LADSPA plugins support has been enhanced and a first iteration on FAUST integration. The wiki contains how-to’s that cover most of that.

Most of the GSoC work come as plugins: a SMS Synthesizer (gkellum), a Voice synthesis/analysis (akazem) and some some cool guitar effects (hordia). Also not included as plugins but in the main repository several enhancements have been done on the SMS transformations (hordia) and the tonal analysis (rgoj).

Some interesting work has been done on the Barcelona Media Audio Lab on having a system to simulate 3D room acoustics which can be reproduced on several exhibition systems. Some precomputed room databases are available to try. Check the wiki NetworkEditor Tutorial for more information.

Regarding the applications, Network Editor incorporates new usability enhancements, a new on-line Tutorial and a new Spectrogram like view. The Annotator received Bennet Kolasinsky attention improving its the flexibility of its interface, the practical effects are multiple segmentation and low-level descriptors panes and that we are pretty close to visualization and auralization plugins.

Enjoy.

Two CLAM journal articles

The past few weeks a couple of CLAM-related journal articles have been published in two top-tier journals.

The article entitled “A framework for efficient and rapid development of cross-platform audio applications” – coauthored by Xavier Amatriain, Pau Arumi, and David Garcia – has just appeared in the ACM Multimedia Systems Journal. This can be considered as the “ultimate” CLAM article. Apart from presenting the main features in CLAM, we talk about the metamodel and some of the patterns present in the framework design.

Also Xavier Amatriain published the article entitled “A Domain-Specific Metamodel for Multimedia Processing Systems” in the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. This is a more detailed and justified explanation of the metamodel that was derived while designing and implementing the CLAM framework.

CLAM team at Googleplex

Last month Pau Arumi and David Garcia from the CLAM team attended the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit at Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Hundreds of mentors from many of the participating projects were invited to a one-day workshop where different issues related to the Summer of Code and Open Source in general were discussed. It was a great opportunity for the CLAM team to make connections with related projects and meet many interesting people.

Read more at David’s blog.

CLAM articles at Polish Linux Magazine

Polish journal Linux Magazine has recently published two articles about CLAM, written by Pawel Wolniewicz. First — dealing with Music Annotator, SMSTools, and Voice2MIDI — and second, describing development of audio application, using Network Editor, accompanied by Prototyper. They were published in July and August issues.

Both articles were written in Polish.