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Sweep is an audio editor and live playback tool for GNU/Linux, BSD and compatible systems. It supports many music and voice formats including WAV, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis, Speex and MP3, with multichannel editing and LADSPA effects plugins.

It is Free Software, available under the GNU General Public Licence.

Check out the download page for information about downloading source packages and binaries for various operating systems.

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Screenshots

Scrubbing?!?

Sat Apr 12 2008 -- Version 0.9.3

New in this release

This is a bug fix release, containing the following changes:

  • Fixed bounds checking of mode in speex header. relates to: oCERT 2008-002.
  • Fixed bug preventing device dialog being reopened when closed via the window manager.

All users with Speex handling enabled should upgrade.

Meet Scrubby!

 

"They said it was a short man with serious funk but no-one could recall his true name. It appears he was a mysterious stranger. Some believe him to have mentioned the word Scrubby but others believed he was really the ultra-hip alter ego... Audioscandaglio." -- Patrick Shirkey, Fri Dec 13, 2002

Inside Sweep lives a pesky little virtual stylus called Scrubby who enjoys mixing around in your files. Scrubby can be quite a lot of fun to play with, because you can drag him around any digital audio file just like dragging the stylus around on a vinyl record.

For editing purposes, Scrubby can give you a very clear idea of exactly what is in the file you are editing. You can drag him around your cut points to find exactly where to make an edit, just like you would have slowly turned the reels on a tape machine in the old days. You can also place him in a file while an effect is being rendered to zone in on the changes in real time.

For DJing purposes, Scrubby really comes into his own. Sure, you can scrub around in all your favourite samples and loops. You can even scrub on live input: plug a microphone in, hit record and scrub on a vocalist's words as they are being recorded.

Sweep's basic DJing functionality includes simultaneously mixing an unlimited number of samples and loops, including live input, each with their own gain and +/-10% speed controls.

Taking this further, you can use Sweep's reverse playback toggle and piano style QWERTY playback (using your computer's keyboard to play musical notes, just like an old-school tracker) in conjunction with Scrubby for even more versatile performance techniques.

Scrubby is as easy to use as putting the needle on a record, and in conjunction with all of Sweep's other playback and recording features he turns Sweep into a really flexible environment for manipulating digital audio. Go Scrubby!

Features

Take the screenshot tour for a visual introduction to Sweep.

The full list of features includes the following:

  • Extreme ease of use:
    • Unlimited undo/redo with a fully revertible edit history
    • Multithreaded background rendering and file import/export: effects processing is not disabled during playback, providing instantaneous feedback.
    • Precise, interactive scrubbing
    • Multichannel file support: Sweep provides complete editing and processing for multichannel sound files.
    • Customisable keybindings available for all operations
    • Translations for French, Hungarian, Italian, German, Russian and Polish.

  • Support for many PCM and voice file formats via libsndfile by Erik de Castro Lopo:
    • at least 14 PCM sound file formats formats including WAV, W64, AIFF/AIFF-C, IFF/SVX, AU and raw PCM files.
    • PCM audio encoding formats including 8/16/24/32 bit PCM, 32 and 64 bit floating point, u-law, A-law and ADPCM
    • voice encoding formats including GSM 6.10, G721/G723 ADPCM, 12/16/24 bit DWVW

  • Support for Ogg Vorbis format audio files:
    • an exteremely high quality, free, open and unpatented perceptual audio codec.
    • supports intuitive variable bitrate encoding, where the Vorbis encoder makes low-level encoding decisions.
    • provides access to average bitrate controls, including bounds on minimum and maximum bitrate usage.
    • Sweep provides sensible defaults and remembers encoding options between sessions.

  • Support for Speex files:
    • a free, open and unpatented speech codec designed for Voice over IP (VoIP) and file-based compression.
    • supports optional variable bitrate and control over encoding complexity and frame packing.
    • Sweep provides sensible defaults and remembers encoding options between sessions.

  • Support for LADSPA effects plugins, including:
    • the Computer Music Toolkit by Richard Furse, containing high and low pass filters, compressors, delays, and a port of the popular Freeverb reverb unit.
    • SWH plugins, over 30 effects plugins by Steve Harris, including overdrives, comb filter, ring modulator, pitch scaler, chorus, flanger and various distortions.
    • more listed at ladspa.org

  • Powerful editing operations:
    • Cut, copy and paste insert: conventional cut or copy selected regions of a sound, and paste into the same or other sounds.
    • Discontinuous selections: select multiple regions of a sound and operate on these regions simultaneously
    • interactive moving and merging of selection boundaries
    • Selection invert, selection double/halve and selection shift left/right

  • Intuitive visualisation:
    • Multiple views per clip
    • Variable zooming to below 1:1 with mouse wheel support
    • View Center, Zoom to Selection, Zoom Normal
    • Easy differentiation of multiple files with 6 standard colour schemes including Decoder Red, Orangeboom, Coogee Bay Blue and Blackwattle.

  • Versatile playback modes:
    • Standard transport features: play/pause, stop, rewind, fast forward, scan reverse/forward, go to end/beginning.
    • Simultaneous playback of multiple files
    • Play all, play selection, and looping playback
    • Interactive reverse playback: includes reverse previews and reverse looping

  • Flexible recording:
    • independent record and playback heads
    • "tape loop" style recording
    • reverse recording

  • Device handling and portability:
    • Support for Open Sound System compatible audio devices (eg. stock Linux kernel), ALSA 0.6.0 and Solaris audio.
    • Intuitive control of application latency
    • Support for both little and big endian CPU architectures

  • Live playback "DJ" features:
    • Two-handed interactive scrubbing
    • Independent gain levels per file
    • +/-10% pitch slider
    • Piano-style sample playback

Announcements

 Subscribe to the sweep-announce mailing list to keep informed of new releases. (Major releases are also announced on Freshmeat and Linux Weekly News).

There are also mailing lists for user and development discussion.

Scrubby Wallpaper

  Put Scrubby in your background and he will always remind you to keep on scrubbing!.

320x240 [6 kB PNG] 
640x480 [17 kB PNG] 
800x600 [21 kB PNG] 
1024x768 [34 kB PNG] 
1280x1024 [44 kB PNG] 
1600x1200 [46 kB PNG] 

Does Sweep rock or what?

 

We're soliciting views on this important issue. First up, Martin Pool (rsync and distcc hacker) provides an informative comparison between Scrubby and his favourite text editor [578kB WAV].

Go on, record your heartfelt devotion and send in a link to it :)

Events

Conrad will be giving a tutorial titled "Using Sweep: Fun with Scrubby" at linux.conf.au, January 22-25 2003 in Perth, Australia.

Copyright © 1995-2002 Conrad Parker <conrad@metadecks.org> . . . Last modified Tue Jan 17 2006