Arrange your tracks with 'Chain-it-up.ny'

Programming and Development New Plug-Ins
4

Thank you guys for the detailed feed back. I have to reply in portions, it seems.

I am blind, therefore I know exactly what the output is alike. As a matter of fact, the accessibility issue is the point that brought me to writing my own plug-ins.
If one is a little familiar with the functionality of the plug-in, the navigation is actually quite easy. Let’s say I want to choose the cosine S-curve fade-in effect, all I have to do is starting the plug-in, press two times “tab” and then two times “s” and that’s it. What we could do is to take the trim modes to the very top.

"Action choice"
> Trim & append
> Trim & align at time zero
---
"Threshold for trimming"
---
"Transition type"
> No Fade effect
> Fade-out linear
> ...
---



This feature would only be helpful, if you exclusively want to trim without the application of Gap/overlap and cross fade. It would be much more important to enable Nyquist to see the start and end times of the current track/selection and to modify them…
I know Steve’s plug-in. But it lacks (through implementation issues of Nyquist) the ability to choose the files within a conventional file dialog. Furthermore, you can only apply a cross fade between different titles if you split the track again and position them manually, thus nothing gained.

Well, in the german version, the chain command has the hidious Name “Stapelverarbeitung”, what essentially means batch processing. But you’re right, “append” should certainly appear in the plug-in’s name. I firstly contemplated “append and fade” but I don’t want to be involved in your “fade effects battle”…
How about “Append and blend”?

The plug-in won’t chain up if one of the following tracks is the same as the first one (its therefore not suited for looping). If the program wouldn’t recognise the first track, the following would happen:
if the plug-in is called several times with the same selection, the lengths of the previous tracks would be added to the first selected track and thus all tracks would be moved to the right.
Chain-it-up tries to create a “finger print” of the tracks in order to compare them to the first track. It is just like the check sum of your bank account number and as different accounts can have the same check sum, so different tracks can have the same finger print. I am still trying to improve this algorithm, but there are limits.
The trim effect is necessary to determine the length of the track.
imagine that you have two tracks, one is three minutes and the other two minutes and you select them both.
Audacity gives the sounds in the following manner over to Nyquist:
The first is not modified, since it is the longest one. you can readily take their duration and length (get-duration and variable len), but you do not know this, therefore you have to look if there is digital silence in front or appended to the track. In the case of the second track, Audacity still gives a length of 3 minutes over. The program searches now for the zeros at the end and removes them, calculates the new length and stores it in a list that survives different calls.

You mean “Extras & Help”, that is what it should read like. I am going to change this.
The examples were inserted shortly before publication, the menu point is wrongly linked, will be corrected.

I presume you refer to the debug window output. This information was and is necessary during the development to see how the plug-in reacts in certain situations. I fancy that the “force first call” will be removed in the near future. It is maybe replaced by a “two track mode”. The first track handling is primarily internally important. The changing of the vertical order doesn’t influence the plug-ins execution, as long as any parameter is changed in a new plug-in call.

For visually impaired people, the normal output is useless anyway, since one can’t scroll in the text. We could keep the output very brief with the hint that the verbose version can be examined in the debug window. I intent to write a proper tutorial as soon as the functionality and layout of the plug-in is somewhat constant.

Yes, it could be generally be used, where it makes sense. It has some draw backs though, it doesn’t function properly on Linux it seems, on Mac, no one has tested yet. But it is surely an improvement for visually impaired people (which do not use Linux in general).

At the moment, it plays 0.5 s before a fade-out, after a fade-in and also 0.5 before and after a cross-fade. We can change this to 1 second. There are also some clicks, which could be removed to get a more pleasant preview.

I hope Mr Bell hasn’t seen that…
Thank you very much, Gale, that helped me a lot.

5

Thank you very much, such a statement is surely motivating, especially when it is made by an old stager.

Have you any proposal? I could have named it “String-it-up” but this suggests rather a hangman’s effect…
So far we have:

  • “Trim and Append”
  • “Append and Blend”

Should there also be a hint in the info line of the GUI? I personally do not like those Texts, since they are always read out by the screen reader, when you start an effect.

The idea to the plug-in is older than the possibility to execute Nyquist effects in chains. I presume that there is no possibility to check if the effect was started within a chain script, otherwise it could have been adapted for this case.

That’s interesting. I don’t work with clips though, since they’re not accessible.

It depends if the track with the different sample rate is the first or not. I did some correction but I am surprised that it yields no error any more. I need to check this.

Well, I am rather fastidious and do not like to present work that is only half done. However, the plug-in works fine to some degree and I’m happy to improve it due to the inputs from this forum.

Well, when I compiled a 1 hour CD with my favorite Dinah Washington songs, it took only a few minutes to process, a thing that I sure couldn’t have done myself in this time.

This should theoretically only be the case if the first track appears a second time. Maybe the first track detection will disappear altogether but it is necessary at the moment if the effect is applied several times (e. g. to deepen a fade-effector to apply it anew after a undo).

Trimming is always enabled (see last post). I have no explanation at the moment. Can you reproduce the bug?

It is a fairly complicated application flow thus it is hard to tell why this was the case.

In the title, the menu or where? Should it rather be “Chain It Up”, “Append And Blend” or something else?

Solely could be replaced by only. There must be a different leading character in front of the 3 fade types to facilitate the navigation per keyboard. The loudness control would be verbosely:

"Loudness control for sounds that are"
> equal (no mid-boost)
> fairly similar (+1 dB) 
> scarcely similar (+2 dB)
> different (3 dB mid-boost)

I don’t know how long the strings in the controls can be. I still hope to implement a half-automatic loudness control, that can be either enabled (up to equal power boost) or disabled (=equal gain).

Any consequences for my plug-in? is the default trimming threshold of -60 dB a good choice? If I am right, the dithering begins at about -71 dB. Should one test, which bit-rate is used?

As mentioned in another topic some time ago, it is a pity. The preview function is one of the highlights in this plug-in, because you don’t have to scroll thru an hour of music to hear the transitions.
Thank you very much Steve

6

To clarify, “dB” needs to be lower case d upper case B in GUI elements, error messages, debug messages and comments. Within the actual code it can, and usually will be lower case. I realise that this is a beta version, but if / when you have plug-ins ready for public release I’ll be happy to help with capitalisation and code indenting.

In that case, how about something like “Angekettet Spuren”?
I like the idea of having some reference to “Tracks” in the name.


I’ve now had a closer look at some parts of the code.
I like your novel approach to the “trim” function. I’ve not compared the performance to other methods but it looks like it should be pretty fast as it avoids any looping in LISP. It’s not necessarily the best way to do this in all situations as “snd-maxsamp” causes “sig” to be computed and saved in memory, but in this application it works really well. In the manual it is noted that snd-maxsamp “will probably be removed in a future version. See peak, a replacement”


I notice that you have posted while I have been typing, so I’ll post this now then read your reply.

7

It was previously common practice to include description and instructions in the GUI of Nyquist plug-ins but we are moving away from that now. Plug-ins that are available on the wiki are now documented on the download page. Plug-ins on the forum can be documented on the forum. Documentation can also be included as a separate file and bundled with the plug-in as a .ZIP download.

Hopefully in the future Nyquist (and other effect) will have a better mechanism for displaying help screens, so we are currently moving away from building help screens into the plug-ins. What I would like to see is a help button that links to a web page as this would allow direct linking to the manual.


I’ve only tested this briefly and may have missed problems.


Alpha / beta versions can be useful for getting feedback on ideas before spending a huge amount of time polishing all of the rough edges. I am very keen to encourage feedback both on plug-ins and on new Audacity features. “Experimental” features that may not persist into the finished versions can also be instructive or inspirational for other plug-in authors, for example I’ve been looking at your code for “zero crossing search” which has given me an idea relating to a granular synthesis effect that I’ve been playing with.


Performance varies a lot between different platforms. For some reason Nyquist tends to be a lot slower on Linux than on Windows. When I tested on a long CD, I cancelled the operation after 15 minutes processing time.


I’ll have a look and post back.


The ;name header text should be in Title Case.
For example:

;nyquist plug-in
;version 3
;type process
;categories "http://lv2plug.in/ns/lv2core#MixerPlugin"
;name "Append Tracks Deluxe..."

Upper-case "A, upper-case “T”, upper-case “D”


The displayed menu item is about 15 characters, but the text is proportional spacing so it can be more or less.
When the menu is open, much longer text is visible in the menu.


Yes I noticed :smiley:

8

It does not seem to be specific to the trim options, but there is a problem …

Track 1: Generate 5 seconds sine wave
Track 2: Generate 4 seconds of white noise
Track 3: Generate 3 seconds of Pink noise.

Apply “Chain it up” with the default settings.
Undo
Move track 3 to the top.
Apply “Chain it up” with the default settings.

The spacing is wrong.

Apply Chain it Up with “force first call” (I’m attempting to “reset” the effect).
Help screen 6 is displayed 3 times.

Apply “Chain it up” with the default settings.

The spacing is still wrong.

At the very least, there needs to be a clear “reset” option.

9

The reset option will be removed. Normally, a reset is created by changing the selection (horizontally) or any of the plug-in’s parameters (except the help menu). As you know, the effect doesn’t realize that it is processing the last track of a selection, thus the control if the first track is encountered anew.
The Help menu is wrongly linked, as written above.

I really like the name “Append Tracks Deluxe” (although its not very modeste…).

The zero-crossing is in fact from some code that I wrote for the purpose of a granular synthesis. It delivers in the original a list of all zero crossings. It is fairly fast.
The slow part is actually only the reassemblying of the different sounds per “extract”. I’ll send you the code-snippet if you like.

10

Never mind about modesty :smiley:

I’d be interested to see it. If it’s open source then please feel free to post it in a new topic (the Nyquist forum board does not need to be full plug-ins. It’s fine to post snippets there.)

11

I’ve split the post about zero crossing detection to here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/zero-crossing-detection/26237/1

12

I’ve split the post about passing track information from Audacity to Nyquist to here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/information-passed-from-audacity-to-nyquist/26230/1

13

I really like the name “Append Tracks Deluxe” (although its not very modeste…).

“Duckling Management” from the way that baby ducks follow each other single file when they travel.

As I understand it, the process tries to find the audio in each sound file and assumes dead silence is useless? Can you turn that off? That removes pacing and meter control from the author of the show.

“And now, a moment of silence for our dead comrades…”

Koz

14

Unfortunately, artificially created silence will always disappear.
Let’s say we have three tracks:

  • Trk1 1 min intro music + 5 s silence
  • Trk2 2 s noise floor 1 min Music 5 s noise floor
  • Trk3 1 min outro 10 s fade-out.
    If all tracks are selected, the passed Sound to the plug-in has always the length of the longest track - 1 min 10 s.
    Thus the first track will be padded with 5 s Zeros (White space) and there’s no difference to the appended silence of 5 s (unless a dithering took place).
    The only Thing one can do is to set the threshold at -120 dB, this will only remove absolute silence and preserve the noisy floor from track 2.
    I think that graveyard silence is in any case something that spoils the Show (I am used to the romantic crackles of Vinyl inbetween Songs…).
    [possible Feature: fill gap with ambient noise instead of pure silence].
    However, it’s easy to process the tracks pairwise and to set the appropriate pause (“gap”), e.g. first two tracks with 5 s gap >> render result >> mixed and third track with other gap (or overlap) for the final stage.
15

By the way, we call it “Geese march”. Very pictoresque your idea though.
The meter and pace of the ducks shouln’t be disturbed too much - pauses within the Audio itself are not touched.
Thus, “Stop go stop go stop /+/ stop go stop” would give “go stop go Crash go” :smiley:.

Ps. The new Version is kicking about for some time, should really upload it before the decade Ends.

16

By the way, we call it “Geese march”. Very pictoresque your idea though.

My head does that unbidden.
I’m not wedded to ducks. Geese work for me.
Koz

17

Ants?

18

That brings to mind those videos of ant death spirals where they follow each other until they starve. Geese are good. Natural comedians. GeeseMarch.ny.
Koz

19

Nice, so we call it “geese march.ny”,
The Progress Dialog says:
;Action “Managing Ducklings…” and all Ends up in a perfect mare’s nest.
If that’s not globanimal thinking…

20

LOL :smiley:

21

This is an extremely helpful plug-in. It saves a lot of time when compiling a large number of tracks into one flowing audio presentation, be it a live concert or a radio show.
That said, there are two issues which could be improved. The fact that the tracks are not actually aligned but Silence is added to move the audio makes them very difficult to work with after applying the effect. Key commands such as j or shift-j can no longer be used. Instead the beginning of an audio passage is indicated by the end of the previous track, but that makes precise editing rather cumbersome.
Also the labels of the fade and cross fade options should be more specific as to what they do. I know some of them but others not at all and I assume that most Audacity users haven’t got a sound engineering background.
Notwithstanding the above, thanks for this wonderful all-purpose tool.

22

That’s a limitation of of Nyquist plug-ins. Hopefully that will be improved in the future, but for now it is unavoidable.

Regarding labels, I’ll leave that for Robert :wink:

23

Thanks very much for the feedback.
You can use the command “Edit–>Clip Boundaries–>Detach at Silences” (Ctrl-Alt + j)to eliminate the artificial silences.
Thus, the mentioned shortcuts (j, Shift-j) can be used again.

I’m afraid, you have to try the different fade types in order to find one that suits you. There’s actually no simple nomenclature available.

Linear is equal to Audacity’s Fade-in/out.
Cosine is that one used by pro fade out.
The double S curve is exactly the same as the old Egyptian pictogram for snake.
It starts with the head, curves down into the neck, goes smoothly into the body, goes down again and ends in the horizontal tail.

It makes the fade in two steps, instead of going down to silence, it stays at -6 dB for the longer part and adds another cosine curve at the end.
This is useful for voiceovers. Let’s say you have an intro music for your podcast and want to overlay the episode number and title, you could use one of those three fade-outs over a long period (e.g. 10 s). It’s like ducking the music during the announcement.
You would concretely do the following:

  • Select both tracks
  • Apply CIU with a double s fade-out and a gap of -10 s (= overlap).
  • Optionally a second time for -12 dB.
  • CIU again, but now with “Trim and Chain up” and a shorter overlap (e.g. -9 s)
    This moves the voice to the right, where the constant -12 dB level is already established.
    You can now mix and render those tracks to fix them and select an additional track to chain up, perhaps with another transition type.
    And so on…

I know, some video/audio tutorials would be immensely helpful for this plug-in but I’m not good in such things.