C  D  P     G  U  I  D  E

          by Robert Fraser

NEXT:  SOUNDFILES

 INTRODUCTION

The CDP system is a comprehensive sound design suite of over 450 processes, covering almost every aspect of sound transformation, including many that may be unfamiliar or are presented from an original or compositional viewpoint. The system is not real-time, but is non-destructive: most processes take one or more input files and produce an output file. (The exceptions are SYNTH functions which have no input and INFORMATION functions that report to the console.)

The sheer size of CDP can make it hard to find your way around. In addition, newer processes with separate names are often subtle variations of a previous idea. Although the reference documentation groups CDP into function groups, it is not always easy to keep track of the similarities and differences between related processes. This document aims to provide a quick guide to CDP, grouping functions into categories and linking to the reference documentation. Hopefully, this will make exploring CDP a little easier.

The categories and groups largely follow the menu structure used by the Soundshaper GUI. Functions which are expected in the forthcoming CDP Release 8 have also been included – these are shown as (R8).

On the console, CDP functions are called by two names: the group name, such as ENVEL, followed by the function name, such as CREATE. Most functions introduced since Release 6 have only the function name (which is typed twice). To save space here, we will use just the function name where possible. The hyper-links will then lead to the appropriate reference documentation.

 INDEX TO CATEGORIES

1. SOUNDFILE PROCESSES

These operate on soundfiles (.wav, .aif or .amb) in the time-domain:

2. SPECTRAL PROCESSES

These are in the frequency-domain, operating mainly on frequency analysis files (.ana).

3. PITCH PROCESSES

Also in the frequency-domain, operating on extracted binary pitch files (.frq) and transposition files (.trn), or their textfile equivalents.

4. EDITING and MIXING

Soundfile editing, channel and spatial functions, mix and mixfile functions.

5. OTHER FUNCTIONS

Synth, Information, Data and System Utils

SOUNDFILE   PROCESSES

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The descriptions used in this Guide are adapted from the Soundshaper manual and do not necessarily reflect the views of CDP.
For details of each function, always refer to the CDP Reference Documentation.
For further details about CDP see the Composers' Desktop Project website.