News

Wednesday 30th June 2010

I have moved to appletonaudio.com! The old appletonit.com.au site will slowly be redirected to the pages on this website. I have been very busy this semester at university working on my thesis (which happens to be on my noise reduction software) and getting through final year subjects. I am on holidays for the next few weeks and hopefully will be able to get some more content posted on this website!

Wednesday 27th January 2010

Site has had a facelift which I hope will be easier to navigate. No significant news to report on sampling projects - I have a very fine three manual instrument which I am negotiating a time to come and record. If this project goes ahead, it will be the first free three manual cathedral instrument available for Hauptwerk. Sampling could take place anywhere between now and August - I will post more information once sampling is underway.

Wednesday 26th August 2009

It's been in the making for a very long time but the first release of the St. Augustine's sample set is now available and sounding very fine. The samples have all been processed using my own noise reduction and looping software (available for free download on the "software" pages). All that is not included in the currently available package is:

• A complete and configured wind model.
• The tremulant waveforms - the organ in it's current state does not have a tremulant.
• A well formed enclosure model - the swell pedal currently performs a linear volume fade to the average reduction in amplitude of the swell pipework.

I have released the organ in this state because I am back at university and realistically will not get a chance to fiddle with the detailed bits until late this year or early next year. In its current state, the organ is playable and sounds very fine.

Custom looping software is now available in the "software" section alongside the noise reduction.

Sunday 29th March 2009

It's been a while since the page has had any decent updates (as can be seen by the last update in 2007) so I thought I would make an update. Since 2007, recordings of another organ have been made at St. Augustine's Anglican church in Neutral Bay. The organ is a fine instrument built by Hill, Norman and Beard and is a wonderful example of an English organ that has survived with only very minor changes. I was hoping to have the instrument released by Feburary this year, but this has proven unachievable and now that I am back at university for the year, realistically there won't be any releases for at the very least 6 months, but I do hope to put some audio demos up soon as it is more-or-less playing in my development setup.

Over the last year, I have also been researching and developing my own algorithm for noise reduction (which can be found in the "software" section of the website). The project was commenced initially out of a desire to improve the quality of pipe speech transients in very noisy recordings, however the software has proven itself to be very powerful in general at: removing noise, preserving quality and achieving a somewhat-subjective "life" in samples. I have tested the software with samples from some other developers and have found it to work very well and I am now using it as the primary noise reduction for all of my sample sets. Soon I will put some audio comparisons up.

This new noise reduction software has also enabled me to re-visit the samples that I made of the 3-manual Hunter instrument that I sampled in 2007. It seems to be working very well on the pipework that I have trialed. This does not mean that the sampleset will be released as I am sure that not ALL of the instrument will be able to be saved - but some stops I may be able to release in separate packages.

My workload at university this semester is very large and I am finding very little time to work on these projects - but they will be completed at somestage... I just will not be able to do that much work until I have a break.