Aurora for Audacity Beta, first release of 5 plugins for Audacity

We are proud to announce the release in Beta version of 5 Aurora modules, compiled for Audacity:
- Acoustical Parameters
- GENSWEEP
- CONVOLVER
- CROSS FUNCTIONS
- ITU P56 Time History Analysis

Audacity is a general purpose wave editor program similar to Adobe Audition, but with better multichannel support.
It is open-source, and it woks under the three major operating systems (Windows, Mac-OSX, Linux)
More infos on Audacity here:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

The Audacity version of the Aurora plugins take advantage of the better multichannel support available under Audacity. This, indeed, makes the things a bit more complex to manage, particularly for the convolver, which can now work as a "matrix convolver", replicating the features of our famous VST plugin X-volver.
We plan to post here a guide for explaining these new multichannel features of Aurora, made available under the Audacity host program.

You can download the new Aurora for Audacity plugins here:
http://pcfarina.eng.unipr.it/Public/Aurora-for-Audacity/
For installation it is necessary to manually copy the Aurora modules inside the "modules" subdirectory of the installed app.

Edited by angelo.farina - 26/11/2012, 00:28

As known, Linux distributions are much more difficult to operate than Windows or Mac distributions, due to the fact that any Linux machine is somewhat different.
Conceptually, one should simply install (employing Synapytic) the standard distribution of:
- audacity 1.3.12-2
- libwxgtk2.8-0 2.8.10.1-0ubuntu1.2
- libfftw3 3.2.2-1

Then you download the moduless from my web server (the address is above), and copy them in
/usr/share/audacity/modules

Please note that I have just updated three of the modules for Linux:
(AcParameters, Convolver, SweepGenerator) - these have just been tested to work on a "standard" Ubuntu machine...

Edited by angelo.farina - 26/11/2012, 00:34

I will ask Simone Campanini to look into your debugging info. My knowledge of the Linux environment is too poor for understanding where the problem comes from.
What I can say is:
1) On other OSs, such as Windows and OSX, a 32 bit program runs smoothly under the 64-bit version of the OS.
2) Your error messages simply indicate to me that you did not install the required libraries, FFTW and libwx_gtk2u. Have you tried to install these libraries from the repositories (wih Apt-Get or Synaptic)?
3) Did you install the 32-bit version of Audacity or the 64-bit version?
4) Why are you using a 64-bit OS? The benchmarks done here at the University did clearly indicate that the 64-bit version of any OS gives advantages only if the computer is equipped with more than 4 Gbytes RAM, configured in dual-channel mode (so, in practice, you need to have 8 Gbytes or more...).

But I leave the final word to Simone, he is the real Linux expert here...

Hi Bruce,
happy to see you here...
I hope to be able to port more plugins in the next months. STI is the next one...
I must say, that "purchasing" Audition had not been a problem for my students here. But I know, England is different, I see my son (who is studying in York) was forced to move to open-source software for almost anything to be officially used at the University...

Edited by angelo.farina - 7/12/2011, 17:21

The directory name was self-suggesting, in my opinion.
It appears this was not true in your case, indeed...
Now that Audacity 2.0 is released, on the web site you find the version of the Aurora plugins which work with it...

As already clearly explained above, each version of the plugins is for ONE SPECIFIC VERSION of Audacity. You cannot use the plugins v. 2.00 with Audacity 2.02...
We were almost finished with plugins version 2.01, when Audacity was further stepped up to 2.02, se we have now to recompile everything again, fixing incompatibilities, etc...
It is unfortunate that Audacity (as most of the open source software) is being developed with no attention to compatibility with the past. Every minor revision of Audacity, requires approximately 100 hours work for fixing the compatibility with Aurora plugins. And, as the number of ported plugins increases, this time increases too.
After three years, I am starting to doubt that it was a good idea to choose such an unstable host program for hosting my Aurora plugins.
We are seriously thinking to give up, and switch back to a robust, professionally-maintained host program (albeit not free)...