I’m terrible at hiding new features that are exciting to me.
After about a year and a half of hearing DRC (Digital Room Correction) and BruteFIR thrown around the Internet, and not having a use for them myself, I finally see the light. Room correction works wonders on your system’s output, provided it’s a correctable system of course (e.g. having no subwoofer means you’ll never hear bass…).
Unfortunately, the current state of affairs is not very user-friendly. DRC uses a mile-long configuration file to set its parameters, and BruteFIR requires a handful of configuration parameters to get going. Both were designed with Linux in mind — need I say more?
Seeing how I like things to work very simply for the end-user, I’m trying to correct all that. I have a prototype of a plugin that runs in FuzzMeasure to export its measurements for processing by DRC (there’s no use in throwing away a perfectly fantastic tool!), and then providing the output of DRC to my own convolution processor.
Unfortunately, prototypes are far from useful for the everyday user, and I’m probably a long while from actually making this all run on another machine. That said, what I have now is a significant improvement over everything else I’ve seen out there that’s tried to simplify this process (short of very few plug & play hardware solutions).
March 24th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
I’m very interested in your room correction software. My ideal scenario would be to use my mac mini to do parametric eq based on mls measurements - for both mp3 and cd playback in iTunes, and perhaps for a digital audio input stream from an external source.
And if you could add an active crossover capability to feed outboard DACs, that would be really sweet.
August 10th, 2008 at 5:28 am
I have embarked on a Room Correction adventure of my own and I am toying with the DRC plugin you’ve developed. This was very straight forward to use :)
Now I have a couple of PCM files, generated by DRC, one for each speaker and would like to use them in BruteFIR on Mac OS X. I would like to use this in a realtime situation correcting the audio from my DAW (Apple Logic Pro).
I have discovered JackOSX, a handy Mac implementation of Jack, which will allow me to route the audio of Logic to other audio software. What got me onto this was that BruteFIR includes a JACK I/O module which should allow me to route the audio into BruteFIR and back out to my audio interface.
Now if only I could figure out how to get BruteFIR running on OS X (Intel) I could try this all out and make use of the DRC PCM files.
Any ideas?