Amber aims to be a flexible tool for granular synthesis. This synthesis technique is becoming more and more popular in the computer music world, and we felt that the current tools availible to do granular synthesis were not as flexible as one might hope.

The software is released under the GNU public license, with portions of the code restricted under a BSD-like license (these portions were taken from a book by Tim Kientzle called "A Programmer's Guide To Sound" - we needed an AIFF reading class :). We hope to remove these portions at some point in the future and replace it with libsndfile or some other widely used sound file library. We're always looking for help, so if you can offer it, and have the programming chops, please sign on!

Amber is the result of a summer research project by me and my friend and former UR techie queen Jennifer Bernard. At the time of the initial writing, we were music majors at UR. Now Jenny is studying composition at the Cincinnatti College/Conservatory of Music.

Other contributors include Dr. Ben Broening, the supervising professor of the research grant during the inital programming phases in the summer of 2000, as well as Blake Puhak and Matt Avitable. We received immense amounts of help with the underlying equations and coding advice from Drs. Nall, Kent, Hubbard, Charlesworth, and Barnett in the University's Math and Computer Science Department. Thanks!

Please note that I am maintaining amber by myself right now and I don't have a lot of time to keep it going. I'm hoping to get back to it soon, but school takes a lot of time.

Downloadables

• Latest Stable-ish Version: Version 1.1.2 for Linux and most BSD variants. This should compile with no problems on Mac OS X with the developer's kit installed, but remember to install libsndfile first.

Also, please see our SourceForge page, and contact me if you're interested in joining the project.