Actually, Drayon, I use audio-manipulation techniques all the time in my listening. For example, I sometimes get recordings that are going at the wrong speed -- concert recordings, or my dad's old vinyl transfers before he adjusted the speed on his turntable -- and it's nice to be able to adjust that in real time, on the fly, without having to do a proper speed correction. Another thing I like to do is sum tracks to out-of-phase mono, aka "karaoke mode", to see what hidden layers can be revealed in recordings I otherwise know well. And I EQ stuff all the time, given that I listen to many recordings whose fidelity leaves a lot to be desired. (All these functions are also useful for transcription purposes, too.)
Since I have a lot of stuff in FLAC, doing any of that in Logic or iTunes is out, not to mention the fact that the former takes aeons to boot and the latter is horrendous these days. I've been using MacAmp Lite, which has all the functionality I mentioned above, but that's an old and mildly unstable program and I don't know if it even works with Leopard. Audacity is buggy, and more importantly it's not playlist-based -- it has to import everything, which is annoying if you just want to quickly try a few things out.
I'd far rather use Cog for these tasks, if it were possible to do so without adding bloat -- and I get the impression that the amount of code needed to get Cog to interface with Audio Units would be relatively small, because you're not implementing that functionality yourself, just working with an already-existing API.
FWIW, this is coming from a recording engineer and classical musician/composer, and someone who thinks that "end users" are entirely free to "mutilate someone else's music" (!) however they want -- including mine! I'm kind of bemused by your reverence for the recording/mixing/mastering process, as if end-user interference were a blasphemous idea.
Having seen the inner workings of that process, I assure you that these things aren't handed down on golden tablets from on high, and there have been some terrible decisions made in those booths, more than once. (Too bad there isn't an "un-limiter/compressor" plug-in.)
No, it can be a lot of fun to do potentially-atrocious things to a recording, and occasionally I've come up with something transformative and beautiful, just by messing around with a half-dozen tracks in all kinds of ways.
Having said all that, I agree that there are higher priorities for Cog right now -- in particular, getting 0.08 out the door. But I wouldn't pooh-pooh the idea of Audio Units; assuming it doesn't slow Cog down, it only makes it a more valuable tool, specifically because it allows the end-user to use it in unanticipatable and surprising ways.
Last edited by goldenband (2008-11-17 10:39:31)
) version(s) of cog, would complete the "cog experience" for me. audio unit support would be a huge step forward and allow cog to maintain it's minimalist but highly functional aesthetic, while adding a huge host of new options and possibilities.