If someone were to ask me what I think is the most important sonic attribute in sound quality, my answer wouldn’t be imaging or soundstaging, it would be volume. More than anything else, volume determines if the listening experience turns out to be a wow or a meh. I’m not just talking about the overall loudness but also how it fluctuates from moment to moment, which is called dynamics. And the practice of reducing dynamics is called compression.

noise.sh is a digital signal processing spreadsheet for sound design.

Since the 1940s, electric guitarists, keyboardists, and other instrumentalists have been using effects pedals, devices that modify the sound of the original audio source. Typical effects include distortion, compression, chorus, reverb, and delay. Early effects pedals consisted of basic analog circuits, often along with vacuum tubes, which were later replaced with transistors. Although many pedals today apply effects digitally with modern signal processing techniques, many purists argue that the sound of analog pedals can not be replaced by their digital counterparts. We’ll follow a deep learning approach to see if we can use machine learning to replicate the sound of an iconic analog effect pedal, the Ibanez Tube Screamer. This post will be mostly a reproduction of the work done by Alec Wright et al. in Real-Time Guitar Amplifier Emulation with Deep Learning1. Alec Wright et al., “Real-Time Guitar Amplifier Emulation with ↩

MPlayer has a fully configurable, command-driven control layer which allows you to control MPlayer using keyboard. But which are these shortcuts are not immediately know to users of MPlayer. Here is a list of mostly used MPlayer keyboard control shortcuts.

A simple, configurable, cross-platform youtube-dl wrapper for downloading and managing youtube audio (with added features).

ALSA mixer with curses interfaces.

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows. http://espeak.sourceforge.net

eSpeak uses a "formant synthesis" method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.

cli-visualizer is a command-line visualizer. Music visualization generates animated imagery based on a piece of music. Free and open source software.

License music from the only royalty free audio library dedicated to retro music.

Elegant music player for LINUX .

If you have a digital audio device that can connect your guitar to a PC, here is some software you can use to record, edit and process the signal.

Audio processing plugins implemented as LV2.

At Focusrite, our motto is “Sound Is Everything”, and every Scarlett USB 2.0 audio interface exemplifies sound quality with top-quality precision digital conversion, and Focusrite’s legendary mic preamps – two of which are included in the Scarlett 2i2. Like all Scarlett interfaces, 2i2 is fully compatible with Macintosh® (including Yosemite®) and Windows® - and with the new included Red 2 and Red 3 AAX plugins, it’s a perfect partner for Pro Tools®.

Powerful enough to form a complete studio, fast and light enough to run on low-end hardware like the eeePC or Raspberry Pi, and so responsive and reliable that it can be used live, the Non DAW Studio is a modular system composed of four main parts: Non Timeline, a non-destructive, non-linear audio recorder and arranger. Non Mixer, a live mixer with effects plugin hosting and advanced Ambisonics spatialization control. Non Sequencer, a live, pattern based MIDI sequencer, and finally, the Non Session Manager to tie together these applications and more into cohesive song-level units.

The Linux Audio Conference 2009 (LAC#7) took place at the Casa della Musica (CdM) in Parma, Italy, from April 16th-19, 2009. Here is a list of all papers that were presented, which link to the actual slides, photo of the speakers, papers and more.

Rubber Band Library is a high quality software library for audio time-stretching and pitch-shifting. It permits you to change the tempo and pitch of an audio stream or recording dynamically and independently of one another.

a2jmidid is daemon for exposing legacy ALSA sequencer applications in JACK MIDI system.

Main goal of this project main is to ease usage of legacy, not
JACK-ified apps, in a JACK MIDI enabled system.

jack_mixer is a GTK+ JACK audio mixer app with a look similar to its hardware counterpart. It has lot of useful features, apart from being able to mix multiple JACK audio streams.