SND

This document provides practical and up-to-date documentation for using and packaging snd on Fedora and in the Audinux repository.

It is intended for:

• users
• musicians
• researchers
• sound designers

A quick description of the application can be found on the CCRMA SND Wiki page.

Quick overview of snd

snd is a research-oriented audio editor developed at CCRMA (Stanford) by Bill Schottstaedt.

Key features:

• Precise audio editing
• Signal analysis
• Advanced scripting via s7 Scheme
• Modular architecture

Unlike Audacity, snd is designed as:

• Editor + audio processing language

Fedora/Audinux variants

On modern Fedora, it is recommended to provide two variants:

• snd-gui version with graphical interface (Motif/X11)
• snd-nox version without graphical interface (scripts, servers)

This division replaces the older, now obsolete, snd-gtk. This version was based on the now obsolete Gtk2 library.

To install snd:

$ dnf install snd-gui
$ dnf install snd-nox

snd.conf Configuration (IMPORTANT)

Common Historical Error: many older snd.conf files contain lines like:

(cons "/usr/lib64/snd/scheme" *load-path)

or Guile variants:

(%load-path).

These lines cause errors with modern snd (s7).

Scheme Module Locations

Scheme modules are installed in:

/usr/lib64/snd/scheme/

Some important modules:

• effects.scm: DSP Effects
• env.scm: Envelopes
• mix.scm: Non-Destructive Mixing
• marks.scm: Markers

To test a module:

$ mkdir snd
$ cp /usr/lib64/snd/scheme/* snd
$ snd-gui

Then click on ‘View->Show listener’ in the main GUI. In the Scheme console, enter:

> (load "bird.scm")
make-birds
> (make-birds)

Built-in Documentation (Main Source)

snd provides comprehensive built-in documentation:

$ info snd
$ man snd

Some complete documentation can be found in:

/usr/share/doc/snd/snd.html

Keyboard Cheat Sheet (Summary)

c-a: move cursor to window start c-e: move cursor to window end c-v: move cursor to mid-window c-l: position window so cursor is in the middle c-f: move cursor ahead one sample c-b: move cursor back one sample c-q: play current channel starting at cursor c-t: stop playing c-[Space]: start selection definition c-m: place (or remove) mark at cursor location c-j: goto mark c-w: delete (cut) current region M-w: (copy) current region c-y: paste in last deleted region c-_: undo c-x c-s: save your current edition.

s7 Listener — Useful Commands

With snd-gui, to access the s7 console, you must first select: ‘View->Show listener’ in the main GUI.

Some simple examples:

(channels)
(srate)
(sound-length)
(map-channel (lambda (x) (* x 0.5)))

Target Audience and Use Cases

snd is particularly well-suited for:

• acoustic analysis
• music research
• scripted audio processing
• non-destructive workflows

Project Status

Active but discreet development. Code historically hosted on SourceForge. No modern official Git repository, only a SVN repository on SourceForge.