PD Externals

[ridgerider]

Hi all,

I wanted to look into the PD externals of the SoundScapeRenderer for rendering of BRIRs. Did I see it correctly that for the BRS Renderer there is no external? Meaning my use-case of doing a head-tracked BRIR rendering inside of PD won't work? Could I use the standard Binaural Renderer for it? I can't quite remember what the restrictions for each of them were... Basically I have 720ch wavs with IRs of different head orientations for each of my virtual loudspeakers that I would like to listen to. Any particular reason why the BRS renderer does not exist as an external? :) Since PD is running anyway (see my past threads on head-tracking and OSC messaging) it would be nice to have everything in one place and not have to bother with Jack on OS X.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Best,

Jan

[Matthias Geier]

Hi Jan.

On Mon, Sep 9, 2019 at 1:05 PM ridgerider wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I wanted to look into the PD externals of the SoundScapeRenderer for rendering of BRIRs. Did I see it correctly that for the BRS Renderer there is no external?

Yes, there is currently no external for the BRS Renderer (nor for the
Generic Renderer).

> Meaning my use-case of doing a head-tracked BRIR rendering inside of PD won't work?

Not out-of-the-box.

> Could I use the standard Binaural Renderer for it? I can't quite remember what the restrictions for each of them were...

Well, only in a very limited and awkward way.

The BRS Renderer allows loading multiple BRIR sets, while the Binaural
Renderer only loads one set.

So you would only be able to load a single BRIR set into the Binaural
Renderer. And then you would have to invert all the angles. And if you
use a head tracker, it will probably turn the wrong way around.
You'll probably also have to stand on your head while listening.

In the best case it's confusing, but probably it doesn't work at all
in the way you want.

> Basically I have 720ch wavs with IRs of different head orientations for each of my virtual loudspeakers that I would like to listen to.

Yeah, that sounds like the BRS Renderer.

> Any particular reason why the BRS renderer does not exist as an external? :)

Yes, there is actually a reason:

It's about the initialization parameters. The BRS Renderer didn't fit
with the rest of the renderers.
Other than that, it should be no problem to create an external for the
BRS Renderer.

Currently, the SSR externals accept two numeric arguments (number of
sources/inputs and number of threads) and up to two string arguments
(different for each renderer, e.g. HRIR file for ssr_binaural).

All externals share the same code for checking those arguments.
Someone (you?) would have to write separate code for the BRS Renderer
(and probably for the Generic Renderer).

A BRS external would need a way to specify multiple BRIR files. The
number of those files would imply the number of inputs, therefore a
numeric argument would not be necessary for that.

It would still be nice to be able to specify the number of threads.

> Since PD is running anyway (see my past threads on head-tracking and OSC messaging) it would be nice to have everything in one place and not have to bother with Jack on OS X.

Sure, that makes sense.

> Any help would be much appreciated!

Well, same for me. It would be great if somebody could implement this!

As a first step, you could create an issue at
https://github.com/SoundScapeRenderer/ssr/issues for that.

cheers,
Matthias

> Best,
> Jan

[ridgerider]

Thanks a lot, Matthias! 
I'll see if I can find the time to implement this. Good to know that it's probably not worth the effort trying to find a work-around with the binaural external.

Cheers,

Jan