Open source mixing console
Posted: Thu May 09, 2013 11:22 am
Hi,
First of all, please excuse us for our poor English! Currently in a French engineering school, we are a group of four students working on a mixing console project using Xmos. The main idea of the project is for it to be open source: musicians or amateurs who are interested could easily make it by following simple instructions. Since everybody would be working with the same hardware, there won’t be any problem of compatibility so everyone could easily exchange audio effects, programs, algorithms, ideas etc. The aim of this project is to create an easily transportable audio mixer that could be used live by musicians without a computer attached to it.
In the beginning, we thought about programming on a classic DSP. But for every leading brand - although the DSP cards were affordable - their IDE were all overpriced for a student project like ours. So when we found Xmos, we knew it was for us!
Since we’ve got our XS1-L2 recently, we are starting to program effects. For the moment, effects like reverb, equalizer, chorus and flanger are working perfectly. There will be soon the phaser effect, and why not some other fun ones that we can create ourselves.
Although we know about the GitHub where many effects’ codes can be found directly, we wanted to program the basic effects on our own to be sure we understand perfectly how everything works. Also, GitHub is still a little bit complicated for the uninitiated, so we’re saving it for later.
Afterwards, we will have to create an interface by adding buttons, switches, a VU meter, and an LCD screen. But for now, we're only focusing on analog audio so there is no S/PDIF, no MIDI, no USB and no external memory, just audio!
Let us know if you are interested and if you have some other additional ideas. We’ll keep you informed about the progress of our project!
First of all, please excuse us for our poor English! Currently in a French engineering school, we are a group of four students working on a mixing console project using Xmos. The main idea of the project is for it to be open source: musicians or amateurs who are interested could easily make it by following simple instructions. Since everybody would be working with the same hardware, there won’t be any problem of compatibility so everyone could easily exchange audio effects, programs, algorithms, ideas etc. The aim of this project is to create an easily transportable audio mixer that could be used live by musicians without a computer attached to it.
In the beginning, we thought about programming on a classic DSP. But for every leading brand - although the DSP cards were affordable - their IDE were all overpriced for a student project like ours. So when we found Xmos, we knew it was for us!
Since we’ve got our XS1-L2 recently, we are starting to program effects. For the moment, effects like reverb, equalizer, chorus and flanger are working perfectly. There will be soon the phaser effect, and why not some other fun ones that we can create ourselves.
Although we know about the GitHub where many effects’ codes can be found directly, we wanted to program the basic effects on our own to be sure we understand perfectly how everything works. Also, GitHub is still a little bit complicated for the uninitiated, so we’re saving it for later.
Afterwards, we will have to create an interface by adding buttons, switches, a VU meter, and an LCD screen. But for now, we're only focusing on analog audio so there is no S/PDIF, no MIDI, no USB and no external memory, just audio!
Let us know if you are interested and if you have some other additional ideas. We’ll keep you informed about the progress of our project!