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by Tim Kientzle

Author:	Tim Kientzle
Subcategory:	Programming
Language:	English
Publisher:	Addison-Wesley Professional (October 27, 1997)
Pages:	464 pages
Category:	Technologies and Computers
Rating:	4.5
Other formats:	mobi txt txt rtf

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A programmer's guide to sound. A programmer's guide to sound. Books for People with Print Disabilities.

A programmer's guide to sound. Internet Archive Books. Uploaded by Tracey Gutierres on May 21, 2012.

Bobby Prince, composer and sound designer for computer games including Doom and Duke Nukem 3D "This is the kind of book that will stand as one of the defining works in the specialization of audio programming. Gene Turnbow, senior programmer and game designer for Sound Source Interactive, Inc. "I'm amazed at the breadth and depth of Tim's coverage.

Discover new books on Goodreads. See if your friends have read any of Tim Kientzle's books. The Working Programmer's Guide to Serial Protocols. Tim Kientzle’s Followers. None yet. Tim Kientzle. Tim Kientzle’s books. Want to Read savin. ant to Read.

Programmer's Guide to Sound, A. By Tim Kientzle. As a programmer, I'm often frustrated when otherwise excellent books stop just short of giving me the details I need. Published Oct 17, 1997 by Addison-Wesley Professional. A Programmer's Guide To Sound provides detailed technical information about audio storage, processing, and compression, and includes tested C++ source code. For that reason, when I write about programming, I include detailed, tested source code.

A Programmer's Guide to Sound by Tim Kientzle (1997-10-27) Paperback – 1708. by. Tim Kientzle (Author). Find all the books, read about the author, and more. Are you an author? Learn about Author Central. From the Publisher: A Programmer's Guide To Sound provides detailed technical information about audio storage, processing, and compression, and includes tested C++ source code. Developers who wan. More). Scaling bitmaps with Bresenham.

Question: Q: Books/DVDS/CDS Please. Tim Kientzle : "A Programmer's Guide to Sound". Also, I'm very interested in audio programming and would be very grateful if someone could recommend the best books out there for again a beginner in audio programming and DSP. Thanks a million.

What makes this book different? Learn concepts together: The problem with many English pronunciation books is that you learn one concept, then another. In American English Pronunciation, you’ll find an integrated approach and learn concepts together. For example, when you learn the sounds, you’ll study what they’re like in stressed and unstressed syllables. Study real conversation: A large chapter at the end takes all of the concepts you’ve learned and applies them to real conversations you’ll hear in everyday American English

A Programmer's Guide To Sound provides detailed technical information about audio storage, processing, and compression, and includes tested C++ source code. Developers who want to add sound technology to their applications will find all the details they need to access low-level sound services on Win32, Mac OS, and UNIX; decompress MPEG, IMA ADPCM, and [mu]-Law data; read from WAVE, VOC, AIFF, and AU file formats; and play MIDI and MOD music files.

Comments:

Lcena

WHAT THIS BOOK DOES WELL:
* Explains audio signals, frequency, pitch, and Fourier transforms at a level suitable for anyone who understands trig, and in a highly readable way
* Explains file formats (WAV, AU, AIFF, MPEG formats, MIDI, MOD formats, etc.), and compression schemes, complete with tested implementation code
* Explains basic frequency filtering (with code)
* Implements readable, usable c++
WHAT'S BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK:
* In depth DSPs, physics, acoustics, or mathematics
* More complex transforms, like pitchbending without changing the length, noise reduction, adding reverb, flanging, etc.
* Highly optimized numerical algorithms
IN SHORT: if you need an introduction to the subject or just want a royalty-free code base for file format handling, this is an excellent book. If you already know all the basics, you won't learn very much.

Winail

This book is pretty decent, pretty much what I was expecting, except the publisher, Addison-Wesley, has stopped shipping the book with a CD. Instead there is a note in the book instructing you to go to their website for a downloadable version of the CD.

Surprise! No downloads available for this title!

The CD contains all of the code from the book, project files, sample sounds, and code that is not in the book, so in my opinion, the CD contents are pretty necessary.

So far I have written them several times (very politely) with no response and I've spent hours on the phone trying to get this problem resolved, only to get transferred to four or five people and eventually transferred to a recorded message saying that they "cannot take my call at this time" and to call back.

So... do not buy this book unless you don't mind not getting the CD.

Update - 06/2015 - almost 10 years after the fact:

As John pointed out in a comment to this review, the CD contents are now downloadable. Thanks John. At the time (2005) that content was not available, and when I finally got through to someone on the phone they insisted that I had a "photo copied" copy of the book. I don't know what I could have said or done to make them land on that assertion. I even offered to send them a copy of my packing slip and a photo of the physical book, but they weren't interested. I ended up calling a few times in the hopes of speaking to someone more reasonable, but the same woman answered each time. Oh well, that's ancient history. I have adjusted my rating from two stars to four, since it should be about the book and not the publisher.

Yozshugore

Since this book was written almost ten years ago, you really have to ignor it when it talks about platform-specific code. However, this book is still valuable because it includes the details of many audio-specific algorithms you can't find in other books.

Part one is an overview of audio basics, and is a worthwhile overview if you are a novice. Part two, on system specifics, can be skipped since it is completely out of date. It mainly talks about audio on specific computing platforms. Part three, on compression, does a good job of explaining and implementing various basic compression algorithms such as uLaw and PCM. Even the chapter on MPEG compression is pretty good, with a pretty complete description of MPEG-1 audio coding and decoding. Likewise, part 4 on General File Formats is very complete for the file formats that are described. Again, the age of the book comes into play since the file formats covered are AU, Creative Labs' VOC format, Microsoft Windows' WAVE format, Apple's AIFF and AIFF-C formats, and Electronic Arts' IFF format that was primarily used on the long defunct Commodore Amiga. The coverage is complete, it is just, unfortunately, covering mainly dated formats.

Part five covers the musical file formats of the MIDI event-based format and the more obscure MOD beat-based format. I especially liked the section on MIDI, since it has a software-based explanation rather than an electronic device interconnection explanation that you find in so many books. Part six, Audio Processing, is less thorough than other sections. The algorithms in the code do work, but if you've never seen filtering and signal processing concepts explained before, you'll likely get lost as to what is going on in this section. Also, don't expect to see special effects such as chorus explained here either. Part seven, which consists of the appendices is helpful for understanding what is on the accompanying CD, but the section on C++ should have been omitted. It is too short to help a novice and pretty much useless for the experienced programmer.

If you are looking for the specific audio algorithms I've mentioned, you already know C++ and something about audio, and you don't mind digging into the accompanying code to get to the heart of the algorithms included, this is the book for you. If you just want code you can drag and drop into either a Mac or a Windows based machine, you should look elsewhere.

Dorizius

IMHO the only useful stuff in this book are the various file descriptions for different audio formats (which can, of course, be downloaded from various ftp sites all over the net). Other than that it's almost useless as both a reference and a tutorial, being a lot heavier on theory than practice. The code is really top-notch object oriented C++ which makes it EXTREMELY difficult to follow and learn from. Obviously the author had usability in mind instead of learnability, eventhough the usability of the source code is questionable: it's useless for C programmers and it skips all system specifics and uses existing API's to do the work. Nothing about DSP programming is even mentioned in the book. Still, some of the theory parts are pretty interesting which is why my rating is 2 instead of 1.

Winawel

Covers basics of the generation and perception of sound, then shifts into discussion of the various formats in common use by software engineers and hackers. Every programming concept is illustrated with C++ example code, from which Kientzle builds a reusable framework. This framework is available on a CD that is included with the book. This book serves well as a compendium of audio knowledge scattered around in specs, standards, and papers.
I would love to see a future edition with Java bindings to the C++ framework.

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