[Ham-Mac] OS X FFT audio software?

[David Anderson]

Any Macintosh DSP programmers out there?

Just got back from the Edinburgh OS X roadshow hosted by Apple. Amongst
other things I was treated to some amazing music audio software and it made
me think we are not making full use of the Macintosh in our shacks for audio
work. Unlike the PC there just isn't the range of audio processing DSP
software (Multimode excepted). Why? - the modern Mac obviously has plenty of
power for this type of work.

One piece of Mac software that hams keep asking me for is an audio FFT
program specifically for detection in weak-signal work. You know like FFTDSP
and Hamview on the PC.

Some ideas:

http://ham.te.hik.se/homepage/sm5bsz/linuxdsp/linrad.htm

Linrad by SM5BSZ is being developed for Linux running on the PC. This is a
software defined radio and is written in C. Any chance of a port of this to
Mac OS X? The source code is freely available. It can use 4 input channel
A/D at 96KHz sampling to cover a wide portion of a band. This is handy if
you use complex signals from perhaps a dual polarity RX system and want to
sample a wide portion of the band. Alternatively Linrad can just be used
with an existing audio feed from an SSB receiver and still do amazing CW
filtering. 

Ideally it would be nice to have this rewritten in Objective C for Cocoa.
However any kind of port would be a start.

Input devices - As Apple have decided to remove audio input from the new
Macs (except for the Microphone) we have to look for alternatives. If you
have a desktop then PCI audio cards are possible, but it might also be
possible to use the M-Audio USB Quattro A/D (4 channels input at 96KHz),
this may be the solution for laptop and iMac owners.

Lastly what about a simple FFT Realbasic plugin? At least it would allow
some experimentation. Having seen James Milne's VideoPlug for RealBasic
running I now have more belief that such things are possible.

73
--
David Anderson GM4JJJ             <http://www.gm4jjj.co.uk>
    gm4jjj@amsat.org