I checked and IG9 has previously posted a link to the online version -

this app now released to psp - with lots more than the online vers - promise to later come to ipod(?)

don't sleep on it - its a great pocket sample library - small sequencer, synths and melody maker, cool little drum machines -

get this - you can edit your sounds in app on a rinky dink "audacity" like app -

insert silence before your snares and hats on the drum machine - then you have made some air swing - good enough to knock out a 4 on the floor beat with walking bassline and hats doing a boogie/blues shuffle
.

if these days represent the last gasp of the psp - that little box is going down swinging.

Sounds great, thanks for the tip. Any chance it'll be released for the Nintendo DSi?

I haven't seen it in stores here yet, but I am probably going to buy that. It looks amazing and satisfies my needs for a portable sampler.



Heck yeah! I'm a bit of a PSP fanboy from early on, but I don't like what they're doing with the PSP Go! and such.

I want more God of War type of brutal games on my PSP... but you're right, it may very well be time for a PSP2 to really turn things around for the PSP platform.

The new Metal Gear Peace Walker will be a good buy probably, but after that...

nope, DSi doesn't have the horsepower(psp can do floating point calculations, DS/DSI can't). You still get DS-10 plus to look forward to though

Ahh, yes. The Korg DS-10 plus. That one will be awesome, I can't wait.

That's a bit silly actually.. sample playback/sequencing/editing is well within the performance spec of the DS.. people have already made homebrew apps that do all that and more.. and that's usually just one non-pro working on their own.

There's a obvious difference that will give the PSP an edge over the DSi for sure, but while the floating point calculations are pretty useful, they are mostly used other areas like shader programming and heavy graphics stuff as far as I know.

they are also useful when it comes to sounds synthesis and dsp processing. i'll admit that i don't know the technical details, but i've read that's why programs like pspseq are possible on psp and not DS. also I can't really think of any homebrew that pushes samples and synthesis at the same time maybe groovestep and nitrotracker would be the closest, but neither of those seem to come close to this. even comparing those 2 programs to either psp rhythm or pspseq there is a fairly large gap. I'm not knocking the DS, i love DS-10 and glitch DS. it's just that it seems to have the advantage when it comes to user interface while psp can offer more dsp.

It can offer more DSP power, yes... but it doesn't mean the DS is incapable of these things beaterator or pspseq do.. DS-10 is a great example.. there we have:
synthesis + polyphonic sample playback (the drum parts are actually samples which is why you can't edit them in realtime while the seq. is playing) + effects, all being sequenced at once..

Think about early digital samplers/synths/sequencers/grooveboxes.. made waay back. . they have just a tiny fraction of the power of the DS.. even just a fraction of the ARM7, let alone the ARM9 as well.. but were still able to do some pretty crazy stuff!

Floating point calculations can help with things like complex effects and visuals, but basic things - it's not necessary: EG - sample playback/sequencing/basic synthesis - there is no floating point calculation necessary.

now take things like volume control if you want high resolution control, - here's a case where floating points might come into play. A solution is; you can simply set your scale large - say like, 1 is actually represented by 1000 in the program. then you can represent 0.0001 by using the value 1 -

you might still need to divide down at some point if the whole app hasn't been tailored to this - but it means you only have to perform 1 of these operations at the end, rather than all the way through in every calculation..

so like someone said above, it's only when you're processing ridiculous amounts of very fine information (eg graphics, complex effects/mathematics) that it is going to make an impact..

knowledge is power. now i know!

Hi, I'm the guy who wrote PSPSeq and may be responsible for some of the initial fixed vs floating point thoughts, or at least have used it as a reason why I haven't ported PSPSeq to the DS or GP2X. That said I've written synths in both 16 bit fixed point and floating point, so I know something about the topic.

Floating point, more than anything else, is just a huge convenience. If you're working with fixed point you need to be careful to guard against overflow (basically creating a number that is larger than what the data type can represent). Generally speaking in fixed point you configure the processor so that mathematical operations will clip, which means you've hit the maximum value. If you don't do this a full scale positive value quickly jumps to full scale negative and the output sounds terrible.

You also generally want to guard against clipping because that also sounds bad - it's the sort of distortion you get when you yell into a mic or turn up the gain too high on a mixer. The way you do that is carefully choosing how you represent data and design the guts of the synth and FX making sure you don't make it possible for your output to grow beyond an unsafe point. You may also need to add in some checks to make sure this isn't happening. Also, in protecting against overflow you generally have to reduce dynamic range a bit (reserve a couple bits for growth at intermediate states of the algorithm), so the final output might not sound as good.

With floating point, generally speaking, you can just write your algorithm without worrying so much about these issues and scale the output at the end, and you'll be OK. The things you need to worry about with floating point are limited resolution (ie mixing very large and very small numbers doesn't work very well) and the fact that floating point is at some level an approximation so you can't do direct comparisons of value as easily as fixed point.

As for the DS vs the PSP, the bigger issue is the slower processor on the DS. I'm guessing I could have written PSPSeq for the DS but I would have had to port a lot of code to assembly to get a good level of polyphony. Everything in PSPSeq is in C. A lot of work went to tuning the C code and overall architecture for performance, but that's still easier than monkeying with assembly. The fixed point synthesizer was written all in assembly on a older dedicated DSP chip (Analog Devices ADSP-2185 in case you're curious). It ran at 80MHz and could do quite a bit; I would estimate that code was 2x as efficient as the same algorithms on the PSP.

Granted, based on all the attention the DS gets for audio apps vs the PSP, I kinda wish I'd started there in the first place. Ah well.

I haven't tried Beaterator yet but from what I've read it sounds like PSPSeq is doing more real-time synthesis than what Rockstar squeezed out, and I'm pretty damn proud of that.

@ ecb:

Very interesting info there, thanks for sharing! Not sure I understood all of it, though, hehe.
I was actually going to buy the PSP just in order to use PSPseq, but was put off when I heard the unit had to be modded.

However, afaik, the DSi has double the processing power of the previous units, will this make you reconsider porting the program over?

The modding is unpleasant, but you can easily find people on Craigslist who will do it for you for $20-30. Once you're running custom firmware you can do whatever updates to the firmware you want on your own, as well as unlock other people's PSPs. Also you can continue to run commercial software on a modded PSP. Not sure about the PSN store, I haven't tried anything with it, but honestly having access to homebrew would make up for whatever functionality might be missing. First gen PSPs can be had for < $100 pretty easily.



Maybe, though honestly I'd probably write something new if I were going to do something on the DSi. The whole fixed vs floating point thing plus the huge difference in input handling is enough to make me rethink.

Oh and the DSi might have 2x the processing power of a DS, but it's still running 200 MHz slower than a PSP. Based on the specs I've read the DS-10/10+ is definitely an impressive piece of programming. Doesn't reach the polyphony of PSPSeq but they did a good job of writing some optimized code. I'm less impressed with Beaterator.

@ ecb:
Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. I got the impression the modding was a bit of a hassle, but now I may actually give the PSP another look.

The Korg DS-10+ is however first on my list of priorities I used to have the original, and totally loved it, but just recently sold it + the DS to finance the newer version (plus a new DS, of course). This thing is killer.
There are some other progs - homebrew - that also look very cool.

But I'd still love to run PSPseq, so I might just buy the PSP as well
Thanks again.

yo thanks for the rundown in detail, I'm looking to get into a bit of DSP programming soon (although arduino based, maybe work on my DS one day).. so it's cool to hear a bit more about anything related even vaguely. .

done a couple years on computer science (C, java, assembly) but never done any performance-intensive programming that pushes the boundaries of the hardware


I guess with the DS you could make a more retro-style digital synthesiser, I think from what i remember it has dedicated processor for audio for DS apps? or is it just 'all audio processing is done on one of the processors'.

and please do write an app for DS the touch screen would make it alot easier to draw in things like piano rolls/modulations/etc