Composers Desktop Project Forum

Trevor Wishart has confirmed that the program fractal.exe should be the one documented as part of Release 8, with the two modes fractal wave and fractal spectrum - not the one currently distributed with CDP (usage: fractal fractal).

You can download the correct program here: https://www.ensemble-software.net/downloads/fractal.zip
Unzip, then copy fractal.exe to your _cdprogs folder, replacing the current file. If you want to retain the current fractal program, you'll have to rename it first, e.g. to "fractalX.exe". Note that Soundshaper supports the correct program (fractal wave / fractal spectrum), not the other one (fractal fractal).

The PC distribution files will be amended later today; we'll need to clarify which version is in the MAC distribution and amend that as necessary.


 

The answer here is an unusual one. When the final compilation for CDP8 was made on 15th March 2023, a different (earlier?) version of fractal was used from the one we'd already tested and documented. (It would not have been easy to spot this out of more than 250 programs!) The result is that fractal wave and fractal spectrum, as used in Soundshaper, are not recognised by the released version (fractal fractal), which does something completely different. (You can test this easily on the command line: change directory to _cdprogs and type 'fractal'.)

I can make the January '23 version available, but it would be better first to confirm that it is indeed the intended program (i.e. fractal wave / fractal spectrum). I'll take this up with my CDP colleagues and see if we can resolve the anomaly.

As for the the original distort fractal, as noted above this is actually still accessible in Soundshaper under the XTRA | Legacy menu. I think I consigned it there because it didn't seem to transform the sound much at all. 


 

Thanks for this - I'll look into it.

Thanks that works!

I have the same problem but not with XTRA-LEGACY-WAVESETS-CYCL FRACTALS. Some solution?

Thanks for trying it out.

I did manage to get the Distort/Fractal to work on the new SoundThread GUI, but there seems to be alot more parameters on Soundshaper for it, so I still would like to try it there as well.

Just saying that tried the above and also got errors.

Hello, I have been quite into the different CDP processes with Soundshaper lately, but I haven't been able to get the fractal processes to work.

Both Distortion/Fractal and Spectral/Pitch/Fractal give errors. Basically it's saying that it's either missing a wav file or an ana file to process from the temp folder and no matter what I try seem to fix that. First I thought it was something to do with txt / brk file for the transpose, but it doesn't seem to be connected to that.

Any ideas to fix this?

Re 16/32 bit file outputs:  as it happens, none of the main CDP programs supports command flags to nominate an output format. This is mostly for historical reasons: the CDP system was conceived first for the Atari ST with a custom filing system "(sfsys") with explicit options to read/write either 16bit int samples or 32bit floats. At that time the very concept of a 24bit file barely existed.

Fast forward to Windows media formats, and to begin with, again, only 16bit audio was supported by the API (plus legacy 8-bit formats). In a short while, Microsoft added a new format flag option in the header to define 32bit floats (so-called "type-3" file). CDP always had basic tools to convert between 16/32 bit files. More recently, to give access by users to high-resolution formats, we added the possibility to request a floats output by prefixing the output sound file name with "-f". This is supported in Soundloom, and, I assume, Soundshaper.

As Robert indicated, CDP programs read the input file format (e.g. 24bits, but there are others) and use that to set the output format; thus you can give a 24bit file to a program and it will output in the same format. To create such an input file (from 16bit/floats etc), you will need to use what is now the "workhorse" CDP tool "copysfx" to  generate whichever sample and channel format you want from quite a long list.

It is certainly a reasonable idea these days, with GB of disk space to play with, to work entirely with 32bit floats sound files (CDP programs themselves always use floats for internal processing). So long as the file is in the strictly correct "WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE" file format (which CDP programs ensure), native Windows media players (relying on the Windows Media API) will play it on whatever hardware is available, making sample conversions if necessary. Third-party apps are typically more forgiving.  You would then only convert your final master output file to, say, 24bits, for distribution.

So the modern choice is between working with 24bit or 32bit files. In most cases there will be no audible difference, and of course 24bit files will be that much shorter than 32bit files. There is however one rather cool aspect of the 32bit floats file format (as defined by Microsoft), which is supported by CDP programs. Being a floating-point format, the nominal sample range is +- 1.0 (in audio terms, 0dBFS). But there is a lot of headroom available, which matters most with filtering and some mixing operations where that limit can easily be exceeded. With the integer formats the inevitable result is clipping. However with 32bit floats there is no need for that clipping, and the PEAK sample value is also recorded in the file header (these days using a so-called "PEAK Chunk" added to the header, though CDP has always had its own non-portable ways of doing this).

The upshot of all that is that, for example, you can generate a floats output with over-range samples, and the CDP play program "paplay" (I must declare an interest: I wrote it) will automatically apply a scale factor to play the file without clipping.

The merits or otherwise of various soundfile formats is not something I can usefully comment on, other than to say more bits are more accurate (give a wider dynamic range). I'll pass this question to Richard Dobson, who may have a thought or two on the matter.