Want to convert those old 8tracks and Vinyl LP's to digital format?
The Gnome Wave Cleaner Project
What is it?
It is a result of never wanting to boot to MS windows again.
The only reason I had left was because I have this wonderful software to
record digital audio, and the dehiss and declick using some very cool software
(COOLEDIT 2000) and (Declick by M. Paar), to do the audio restoration.
I checked out some of the ongoing projects in linux, and either they
crashed a lot or, didn't do what I needed, so I started this effort out
of selfishness and also as a mechanism to learn the GNOME API for GUI programming
. A lot of the code shows the efforts of that learning
curve, and could certainly be cleaned up, but the I am personally pleased
with the overall design. The goals are simple -- denoise, dehiss
and amplify audio files in the Microsoft wave format, 16 bit only, stereo
only, and assuming a sampling rate of 44,100 hz.
This is still beta code, back up your data files before
you use GWC to work on them!
Credits:
There are many sources to credit, from
the gtkled source code in the ESD volume meter, to wave file format I/O, and
a dozen or so references to audio restoration. This project is able to
exist only due to those who came before. The following is a list of
information sources on the internet that I used:
Godsill, Rayner and Cappe have a very thorough technical paper
on the statistical theory behind modern (i.e. late 1990's) digitial audio
restoration -- this is the basic text I worked from. I must give special
mention to my great friend - G. Edward Seymore (also know as Dereese
Wiggins in the Pacific Northwest Jazz clubs..) Ed provided the intellectual/mathematical
force to break through the somewhat obsure definitions in this paper on
the click restoration algorithm which uses a technique called "Least Squares
Autoregressive interpolation".
This is their paper. (Postscript, 71 pages)
This will only work on intel hardware, due to the big/little endian problems. This is a fairly trivial
problem to correct, but I dont' have that kind of hardware, so I'm not in a position to test it, (hint, hint).
WAV format files only
16 bit, stereo only
It has been tested with large (40 megabyte files), but not huge files.
This could be a limitation due to the memory mapping technique used to
speed up file reads/writes.
Known Bugs:
Undo operation isn't working properly for declicking.
FIXED in gwc-0.03 -
Contributing:
The TODO list is not very long, but help is always appreciated. Areas
where help would be GREATLY appreciated are:
ICONS - they could use a real icon artist, this is what you get when
you spend 15 minutes on each icon and you don't know how to draw...
If you would like to help out, send me some mail
WARNING - This is beta code with no warranty whatsoever.
This code is for educational and demonstration purposes.
READ THIS - If your playback sounds choppy, it is due to
one of 3 things: 1) you have another memory/cpu intensive task
running (such as setiathome), 2) you have a sound daemon of some
type running (aRts, esd), 3) you just don't have enough RAM or
cpu horsepower. I run gwc on a 350 mhz pentium, with 128 Meg of
RAM, and have not experienced any problems. as long as I ensure
that I don't have other big cpu processes running or other sound
daemons.
Download
latest version. gwc-0.06-2, created March 3rd, 2002
Please read the HELP file in the distribution, it contains
helpful information on how to use the gnome wave cleaner to edit your
audio files!
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