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The audio programming book
Boulanger R., Lazzarini V., The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010. 984 pp. Type: Book (978-0-262014-46-5)
Date Reviewed: Nov 21 2011

The technical quality of this book would have suffered if it weren’t for the additional chapters provided on the accompanying DVD. The print part devotes too much attention to elementary topics, such as basic C programming and signal processing initiation. The audio programming left after “removing” the above-mentioned basics is of good quality--almost as good as Zölzer’s landmark audio signal processing books [1,2].

The content of the paper portion is biased toward audio synthesis. In fact, it largely deals with Csound and algorithmic synthesis. Less than 100 pages are devoted to spectral processing and vocoders, and there are more than 200 pages of appendices, some of dubious utility for audio programming and processing, such as “Debugging Software with the GNU Debugger” (available over the Web for free) and “An Audio Programmer’s Guide to Mathematical Expressions” (a reader who doesn’t know what a logarithm is, or how a tangent is defined, should probably put this book aside and come back to it in a few months or years).

Fortunately, the DVD continuation of the book is stronger. Although not quite at the level of what I consider a reference text in audio signal processing and programming--like Zölzer’s audio signal processing books--the DVD is close to it.

There is a strong emphasis in this part on the design of audio plugins, and not elementary signal processing techniques such as companding, binaural processing, and spectral manipulations. MIDI programming is also presented well. Since iPods, iPads, and iPhones have become ubiquitous devices for handling audio, the few detailed chapters with example implementations of audio processing for these types of devices will without a doubt be prized by many. Finally, the more than 300 MB of audio-related code is an asset of this book/DVD.

Should this book be recommended to audio and signal processing practitioners and engineers? Yes, indeed! But don’t lose the DVD!

Reviewer:  Vladimir Botchev Review #: CR139605 (1205-0458)
1) Zölzer, U. Digital audio signal processing (2nd ed.). Wiley, Chichester, UK, 2008.
2) Zölzer, U. DAFX : digital audio effects (2nd ed.). Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, 2011.
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  Reviewer Selected
 
 
Signal Analysis, Synthesis, And Processing (H.5.5 ... )
 
 
Audio Input/ Output (H.5.1 ... )
 
 
C (D.3.2 ... )
 
 
Midi (J.5 ... )
 
 
General (D.1.0 )
 
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