Ok, I have to tell you about some software written by one of our own here: Vladimir Sadovnikov (sadko4u).
He made an app called "Timbre-mill" which I recently had occasion to use. I need to tell you about it because I don't hear anyone mention it, and consequently I think that few people either know it exists and/or what it does. And you should.
From a layman's perspective, this app mixes 2 audio (wave) files together to produce a third (new) wave file. "So what, I can do that with Audacity." you say? No, you can't.
This app doesn't mix 2 waveforms in the normal sense. It uses FFT analysis to extract the characteristics of the waves, and then "mixes" those characteristics (not the actual audio) to produce the new wave. The best way I can describe it is if the two waves could have sex and produce a baby. The baby is going to have some characteristics of both his parents.
How did I use it? I had a collection of tenor sax samples whose tone I liked. The problem was there were no growl samples in this set, and I wanted to include that articulation. I had a separate set of tenor sax growls from another sax whose tone I didn't like. I didn't want to use those unappealing growls with the better normal tones, That would just make it obvious how bad the growl samples were. I thought "Wouldn't it be great if I could take just the growl part and 'paste' it onto the good samples to create new growl samples?". Normally, I would try to EQ and "noise reduce" out the growl sound. But I remembered Dave announcing this app here awhile back. At the time, I thought it sounded interesting, and I bookmarked it for later possible use. Now I had an actual task to try it on.
I "imprinted" the growl waves upon the normal waves, and the result was very, very good. It literally saved me days slaving away with EQ and noise reduction (and probably ending up with worse results).
Well done, sadko4u. I haven't even seen an app like this for windows (although there may be one I don't know about). This guy is not only not "reinventing the wheel" on linux. He's not reinventing the wheel anywhere.
Want to know how a leaky faucet would sound if it could roar like a lion? Get samples of both, and imprint the roar on the faucet. And since this isn't normal audio mixing, if you switch the samples, you don't get the same results when they're mixed. For example, if you imprint the faucet on the lion, you don't get the same sound of a faucet imitating a lion. You get a lion imitating the sound of a faucet,
This tool has uses as a means of creating some synthesized sounds that you normally wouldn't get from most software synths (which you can then assemble into a sfz instrument). You could even take 2 sounds from a software synth, and combine them to get a sound that the synth itself can't make.
Now for the bad news. The app isn't a plugin. You can't run it inside your daw. In fact, it needs to be run from a terminal window. It doesn't have a gui. And it does have a rather complicated set of commands you need to set when running it. (It doesn't prompt, nor directly interact, with you. It simply takes some commands, and then goes off and does the work). And the documentation is rather terse and brief. I managed to figure out how to use it, but it took me awhile.
When I get some time, I'm gonna see about making a (of course ugly) GUI for it, and turn it into a plugin. It deserves that.
In the meantime, if you want to explore it yourself, you can find it at:
https://github.com/sadko4u/timbre-mill