Manual

This is a brief overview on how to use Soundbench after you've gotten it compiled (or if you downloaded a binary). This is kept up to date with the most recent release.

Getting Started

First, here's a brief overview of the interface. At the very top, there are two buttons and a slider. The button marked "Silence" will stop any notes that are being played. The button marked "Hold A4" will hold an A note, which is useful for hearing what a sound will sound like.

At the bottom, if you're on Macintosh OS, Linux, or Cygwin, you will see a CPU meter. This shows how much of your processing power the part of the program that generates sound is taking. If you're on Windows, sadly, this meter won't work. When going through a particularly long operation, this meter will change to a green progress bar, no matter what operating system you're using.

When you open the program, you will be at the About tab. This is just a tab showing the version of Soundbench you're using and the names of the people who worked on it.

Under the Channels tab, you will see options for four different sound generators. By default, all of them are off.

Pressing Type will allow you to choose one for a certain internal channel (there is one channel per row). At the moment, sadly, only bread-and-butter Basic generator is available.

Pressing Settings will allow you to change the generator's settings. For the Basic generator, you can set the kind of wave you'd like to use, the amplitude, wave phase, attack time, release time, and note bias (which just means that if you hold a note, that generator will play a certain number of notes above or below the held note.

Under the Player tab, you can load a MIDI file, choose a track from it (if applicable) and export a sound file using the sound you created in the Channels tab.

Under the Settings tab, you can set the maximum number of notes that can play at once and the sampling rate. Soundbench supports sampling rates from the very common 44.1k all the way to an audiophilic 192k. Note that as you increase the sampling rate, you will also increase the strain on your computer's processor.