If you're the kind of person who enjoys coding on your way to work, you might want to try Pixelang, a new Palm OS / Windows / Linux programming language for video, which now has various sound synthesis possibilities. The always-excellent Palm Sounds blog has been playing with it for a while, and one of their readers posted a interesting/irritating Pixelang demo on YouTube. In short: Try this if you find Reaktor too simple to bother with.
Posted by Tom Whitwell.
Comments:
It's actually easier to create your own native VST then it is is to do some of the sample by sample custom DSP stuff using Core Cells in Reaktor. By the time you understand the algorithms you intend to implement and try to get everything transcribed into their system of, more or less, hieroglyphics, you could write it out in C. Core Cells are great for slightly simper stuff though.
I looked at the Pixelang documentation, and the language looks very limited. Basically, limited drawing, finding the mouse, playing an audio file, etc. But it's free.
If you don't want to spend money or write traditional code, get one of the free Max-like packages (jMax, Pd, CPS, etc.). If writing simple code is OK, try Java with all its multimedia support.
If you have the money and the expertise, buy Max/MSP for visual "flowchart" programming or something like Intel's IPP libraries for C programming.
For some perspective on programming languages with similar missions, look up the following on Wikipedia:
1) the Logo programming language
2) Alan Kay
Logo is a famous old graphics programming language for children. Alan Kay is a famous computer scientist who has invented easy programming languages and environments. Both have been around for decades.
