for links to up-to-date tests.) Available players are
listed here and here.
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The following software package was created for no better reason than producing home-made heavy metal music. It is experimental software, and probably always will be. It is imaginatively named "sndsys" and guaranteed to be the umpteenth program of that name. Apart from creating sound you could also do quite different things with it, but quite possibly wouldn't want to.
sndsys is written in "hardcore stone-age" C, complete with pointers, type casts, printfs, variable parameter lists and other stuff from the nightmares of today's wimpy programmers. As a consequence, it runs fast, uses little memory, compiles fast enough to escape Al Qaeda and crashes politely to tell you you did something wrong.
The default compiler in the distribution Makefile is gcc, but I actually use icc from Intel which is free unless you do it for money. It cut compile time by nearly half compared to gcc and somewhat reduced runtime as well. Anyhow, sndsys also compiles with gcc. Here it is:
Download version from October 10 2007
If the obnoxious sales blurb above hasn't put you off, you could have a look at the following documents: The sndsys tutorial and the sndsys readme file. The former is an introduction which does not require much in the way of programming skills. It contains a description of what sound processing you can do with sndsys, in particular of those things which are not usually part of sound processing programs. The readme is a brief but fairly complete description of how sndsys works - how data are passed around, how processing steps are implemented and so on. It is likely to be of interest for programmers or scientists rather than people who want to create music.
For starters I wrote a small jazzy tune to test sndsys and get the hang of writing instruments. It is unimaginatively titled "Capricious bass" for reasons which may or may not be obvious. It is a nice tune written for electric bass and (sort of) saxophone and has the dubious distinction of being one of very few tunes having been created to acquire the know-how to produce heavy metal music with a homebrew sound processing program.
OGG Vorbis of "Capricious bass"
Next comes an unnamed piece for electric guitar, bass, drums and electrically amplified and distorted violin (aka violent violin).
OGG Vorbis of "Unnamed" featuring violent violin
Now how to play the obscure (to some) file format of the sound files above?
OGG Vorbis is an open and unpatented audio compression format. It has been
consistently found in listening tests to be among the best lossy sound
compression formats in terms of quality against compression rate. (See
Wikipedia for links to up-to-date tests.) Available players are
listed here and here.