ProSound as a propound!
A new version of ProSound has been released by Henrik Bjerregaard Pedersen, updated for compatibility with ARMv7 – which means almost all the platforms on which RISC OS currently runs.
The package was originally developed and released by Oregan Developments some twenty years ago, and provides facilities for capturing1 and processing audio samples. It incorporates its own virtual memory system, allowing it to edit audio files much larger than the RAM available in the computers it was originally designed for – which at the time would have been measured in single digit megabytes.
Facilities provided by the suite include a comprehensive selection of effects and processing options, and it supports a wide range of audio formats – although one in particular that it doesn’t support, and which Henrik says he would like the software to be able to read, is MP3. To that end, he suggests that “If anyone feels like writing a BASIC program for decoding MP3, using e.g. AMPlayer, then I’d be happy to include it in ProSound.”
Unfortunately, there is currently no documentation – which Henrik believes should be online, and says that he would be happy to contribute to such “if anyone wants to start a wiki page somewhere”.
Another thing of note with this release is that it has been tested on a Raspberry Pi 2 and RPCEmu, and updating it for ARMv7 compatibility “was a bit of a nightmare.” It is fully expected, therefore, that there will still be bugs.
!ReadMe
- At the time the software was released, it supported “most existing audio sampling hardware” – however, that hardware was designed for the RISC OS computers that were available at the time, and Henrik noted that “there is currently no way of recording sound” when he announced the new version. However, he is working on an API to allow other applications to provide recorded audio to ProSound – so any third party application capable of capturing sound from any source would be able to feed that audio to the editing suite.
