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Filing | Disk I/O and supported formats
Generic | FScape works with a couple of files on your harddisc. Mainly these are user specified input and output files (sounds, spectral data, images, fscape settings) and temporary files. Disk I/O can be speed up by choosing a larger buffer in the preferences. There you can also change the default temporary and backup path. FScape creates custom icons for its output files using the MRJ Toolkit. Temp files are normally deleted upon exit but sometimes deleting is not possible during one session. When FScape is not running you can delete all orphan temp files (indicated by a file name "fscXXXXX.tmp").
Resolution | All signal processing is internally performed with 32-bit floating point resolution, sometimes even double precision. Multiple modules cannot be directly linked but only be invoked serially (see batch processing). Therefore you may sometimes wish to maintain the full dynamic of floating point data between adjectant steps. In this case choose 32-bit floating point resolution for output files (supported by the IRCAM and NeXT format). If you don't want to work with these files directly you can usually omit output normalization because of the huge dynamic of floating point numbers (there's no clipping limit or level dependant quantization noise). But be careful when listening to non-normalized files with SoundApp etc. because you might hear severe distortion due to DAC clipping. FScape will read any integer resolution from 8 bit to 32 bit as well as 32 bit and 64 bit floating point. It will accept any sampling rates. Yet your choice of output resolution and sampling rate is limited to 16, 24 or 32 bit and a selection of common rates.
Supported formats | Supported sound formats are AIFF uncompressed, NeXT/Sun .snd and IRCAM. SoundDesigner II files are not supported at the moment because they require platform specific code (resource forks are not supported by Java). Please note that AIFF features markers while IRCAM features regions, .snd none of these. FScape sometimes writes markers. Markers and regions are automatically converted into each other. However, when writing .snd files these are lost! The only supported image format is TIFF uncompressed at the moment. Spectral data is written out in the SoundHack/CSound format. QuickTime movies will be implemented soon. For more details on how to choose output files read the article on PathFields.
FScape data files | FScape writes preferences, presets etc. in its own format. It's basically ASCII text but should not be directly edited by you unless you really know what you are doing. Known bugs: QT movies do not work. Sound playback is performed via QuickTime, unfortunately QT does not understand IRCAM or .snd. Usually you will listen to those files with SoundApp. Multichannel spectral data files are written out so SoundHack can read them. There used to be a bug in SoundHack that would cause SoundHack to omit the first frame resulting in swapped channels. I don't know if the bug has been fixed. IRCAM integer files are not read by SoundApp, my fault? To be done: Support AIFF 32-bit floating point via AIFC special compression type. Support for SoundDesigner II?
Contents | last modified: 18-Feb-02