Hydrogen and LADSPA effects

[jeffh]

Would it be correct to say that it only supports using LADSPA effects as sends, and not as inserts on the individual drum cells? If that's not correct, could somebody explain how to do it?

Bonus question: Is there a way to link the samples in it to an external editor like Audacity? For example, double-click somewhere on the sample and it opens in Audacity, edit/save in Audacity and now Hydrogen re-loads the edited sample.

[mauser]

Hi Jeff,

i would recommend to use hydrogen in combination with its jack per-track outputs and an external effect host.
The internal effect routing of hydrogen is rather crappy. We're aware of this fact, but up until nobody had the motivation to give it a rewrite.

The editing of samples in an external editor is not possible from within hydrogen.

[jeffh]

Hi Mauser,

Thanks for replying...

i would recommend to use hydrogen in combination with its jack per-track outputs and an external effect host. The internal effect routing of hydrogen is rather crappy. We're aware of this fact, but up until nobody had the motivation to give it a rewrite.

Sounds like a good-enough solution, I didn't know it could do per-track outputs.

The editing of samples in an external editor is not possible from within hydrogen.

Perhaps you could add external sample editor integration whenever you have the time? It shouldn't be too hard, just add a setting where the user can specify an editor, for example: "/usr/bin/audacity", then launch

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"/usr/bin/audacity" "/sample/you/clicked/on.wav"

...whenever the user double-clicks on the sample?

Thanks, and much respect for your excellent work on Hydrogen

[mauser]

The nasty part is to detect automatically when the editing in the external editor is done (in a cross-platform compliant way). I think letting the user hit a "reload" button everytime is not a good implementation :-/

[wolftune]

FWIW, I think having the user hit reload is perfectly fine. There's lots of things worth complaining about in any software, and that would not be one in my view. Any user making edits knows that they are doing the edits. Hitting reload is easy enough. Maybe a window could come up with the reload button right when the external editor is first launched so that it is obvious that the button should be pressed as soon as the user returns to Hydrogen.

[slowpick]

A main point of having multiple fx in hydrogen, is not having to load, edit, save,
and reload samples. If you choose an EQ, filter, chorus, and delay, as the fx, you have
a very wide sonic range in each beat.

Better to implement sizeable pinnable window displays for the fx selection panel,
and a pinnable expanded popup for the individual drum you want to effect,
so those little tiny knobs become a historic anomaly.

A dockable fx rack. like, but, separate from the mixer, might allow code
to be re-purposed?

[wolftune]

real-time effects like that would be neat. I thought the editing in Audacity thing was purely for altering the actual banks relatively permanently, which is a different stage of work from creating effects.

[jeffh]

The things I wanted to do with Audacity go waaaaaaaaaaay beyond what can be done with LADSPA send effects... I think my technique is pretty common, as literally every Windows and Mac sampler comes with a "open sample in external editor" function since like the 90s or so.... Although it's definitely more for people making weird industrial-style electronic music than people composing film scores.

Think like this:

Move your samples from Hydrogen directly into Audacity by pushing a single button.

Layer with several other samples, all with different start points, end points, envelope, effects, EQ, distortion and reverb, a little time-stretch and then layer with some sub-bass and pink noise.

Push the reload button in Hydrogen to use your new drum sample; now 200% dirtier, with a nice crunch to it.


I can still do that and just reload the samples manually, but then an "open in external editor" and "reload" buttons are still a great convenience. Of course, if Hydrogen were to get insert-effects on the individual mixer channels, then a lot of that could be done within Hydrogen without the need for an external editor at all.

[slowpick]

Not sure if you mean moving all, or multiple selected samples from a kit,
from a single button press, or pressing a single button multiple times to load several individual
samples from a kit.

For example, a drumkit is made or downloaded, but lacks bass and sparkle, the samples
could load as a batch, on separate tracks, and one selected portion received bassboost and
lowpass filter, and others got chorus and highpass filter, and they all went back to the original
places in the kit, with a prompt to save-as. Maybe your new sampler would be easier to
achieve this on, than dealing with audacity, and its team bylaws, whatever they may be?

[jeffh]

I would typically do one at sample at a time, and aim not to do any of the layering within Hydrogen, but have a single highly processed one-shot sample, that is guaranteed to sound consistent because it's been bounced into a single wav file. Here's a more specific example on layering and processing in Audacity:

Kick Drum

--Low--
Sine Wav ->envelope
Deep kick drum
Brown noise ->envelope
->LP filter, compressor, envelope

--Mid--
multiple kick drums
pink noise
->distortion,HP filter, LP filter, EQ, envelope

--High--
white noise
clicky hi-hat
->HP filter, EQ, envelope

Once again, that could mostly be accomplished by using per-track outputs from Hydrogen and inputs into Muse2, Ardour, etc... but that would result in so many outputs and cables that it would become an unruly mess. Ideally, you should only have 1-3 inputs for Hydrogen in your sequencer(accepting 1-5 outputs each), not ~20...

If Hydrogen supported per-track insert effects, I could do some of the more basic layering within Hydrogen, which would still afford me the ability to tweak the EQ and filtering of the samples later in the mix...

Maybe your new sampler would be easier to
achieve this on, than dealing with audacity, and its team bylaws, whatever they may be?

Perhaps someday soon, but it's not there yet. I'm still doing R&D on how best to implement the poly and mono effects. All the same, I like seeing improvement to other FOSS software like Hydrogen, I'm not trying to corner the plugin market or keep all of the good features to myself.

Having said that, I'll probably add the following buttons to it this week before I attempt to implement the effects:

"open in external editor"
"reload sample"
"copy sample to project directory"
"save instrument to file"

, as those add a lot of value without being difficult to implement, or requiring too much thought or planning to get the feature right...

[jeffh]

Well, as seen previously on these forums, I'm the kind of person that if I say I'm going to do something, you can bet that I'm really going to do it

I just added "Open Sample in Audacity" and "Reload Sample" buttons to my own Euphoria sampler(in Git anyways, it'll be in my 12.05 release), and I dare say that it's a really nice addition... If it makes my ~1 month old unfinished sampler feel like a professional piece of kit, imagine what it could do for something more polished and refined like Hydrogen

[slowpick]

Congrats! Thanks for chrome-plating the old Buicks bumpers
Great to see excellent functions added to a core linux app!

Now if you can make it load dssi plugins in the FX section,
I hear there are new ones out there to max out the drums

[mauser]

Hi!

After thinking about the feature some time i think that this is something which can be handy for a lot of people, so i created a ticket for it and i guess it will be implemented in the next version of hydrogen (0.9.7), since 0.9.6 is feature-complete. New features introduce always these nasty bugs
The ticket can be seen at [1], please add comments to it if i forgot anything important in the description.

[1]: https://github.com/hydrogen-music/hydrogen/issues/26

[jeffh]

Sweet! Many thanks

The tracker artifact you created looks good to me, I don't see anything missing from it...

It should hopefully be quite easy for you to implement, it was dead-easy for me; Just added 2 buttons to the UI, then connected them to a function that runs

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QProcess myProcess;
myProcess.StartDetached(QString("/usr/bin/audacity", QStringList() << "/path/to/file");

, and the other to a function that loads the sample again. Granted, I still need to add some checks, error-handling and configurability to it, but that shouldn't be hard either...