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. With the use of libsndfile, you can now do
this on a multitude of audio formats, wav, au, aiff, ...
For those of you interested, I started working up a
presentation describing
the technical aspects of the audio restoration methods used in GWC.
Credits:
There are many sources to credit, most importantly the people who helped take
gwc from an alpha product, to a mature program:
William Welty, who reported bug after bug after crash after crash, until gwc got airborn :-)
Tim Wunder, who reported numerous bugs, and helped to get the playback smooth
James Tappin, who improved the efficiency of gwc's (ab)use of X11 display redraws, and helped get decrackling functional
Ian Leonard, who did some great work on the icons!
Bill Jetzer, who made some serious speed improvements to click detection
Charles Morgan, who made more speed improvements and added the encoding for OGG and MP3 formats
Erik de Castro Lopo, who gave the world Libsndfile
Frank Freudenberg, who added the interface to the FFTW 3.x libraries
Paul Bourke, who graciously allowed the use of his code to fit autoregressive coefficients using the maximum entropy method
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:
Requirements:
Limitations:
As of version 0.17-2, these limitations are gone, with the use of
Libsndfile
Known Bugs:
Contributing:
The TODO list is not very long, but help is always appreciated. Areas
where help would be GREATLY appreciated are:
-
More people need to run gwc and report any bugs/problems. Surely, there
must be more bugs in gwc that haven't been discovered. Come on, try it
out :-)
-
If you would like to help out with programming, or web site
development, send me some mail
WARNING - This is GPL'd 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 2 things: 1) you have another memory/cpu intensive task
running, 2) 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.
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!
Project downloads, (source code, binaries), are available from:
The GWC project files at sourceforge.net
Jeff Welty
February 15th, 2005
jeff AT redhawk.org