About FFTease 3.0

FFTease is a collection of objects designed to facilitate spectral sound processing in Max. The collection was designed by Eric Lyon and Christopher Penrose in 1999, and has been maintained by Eric Lyon since 2003.

Compilation and Installation

This distribution comes with pre-compiled externals for Linux, macOS, and Windows. These externals should reside in a folder called "fftease" and be referenced in Pd patches prepended by "fftease/" to avoid name clashes with other third-party externals. On macOS, the fftease folder should be placed in the user folder "~/Documents/Pd/" to make the externals available to Pd.

Performance Considerations

The default Pd audio buffer settings for both I/O vector size and signal vector size will work fine for FFT sizes up to around 4096 or so. For larger FFT sizes, adjusting the Pd signal vector size and I/O vector size upward can dramatically improve performance. With larger FFT sizes, the reported CPU load may fluctuate. This is because a large FFT is being performed only once for several vectors worth of samples. The default FFT size is 1024, and the default overlap factor is 8. The maximum FFT size is 1073741824.

For Coders

Full source code is included, so that intrepid coders can extend FFTease. The FFTease code is distributed under the MIT license to facilitate deployment to any combination of free, open-source, commercial, or closed-source projects.

Acknowledgements

This update of FFTease was supported by coding, advice, and bug reports from @porres, @umlaeute, and @Lucarda.

Happy sonic explorations!

Eric Lyon
ericlyon@vt.edu
Blacksburg, Virginia
January, 2021