About

Credits

Yap is written by yvan vander sanden for Mute. With support from Musica, Impulse center for Music, and C-TAKT.

More about Why

Yap does not aim to be as good as Pure Data or Max/MSP. Instead, it was created specifically to address a few gaps in my current workflow.

• While Pure Data is certainly a beautiful piece of software, the coding style is very “old school”. YSE (the sound engine) is written in modern C++ and tries to be as transparent as possible. Yap (The gui part) is written as a WPF application in C#. Application development is a lot easier this way.

• Right now, the patcher functionality does not offer anything that does not exist in Pure Data. But I intend to go in quite the other direction, implementing much more compositional objects. I have to start with something though, and the basic objects are bound to be the same in any visual DSP environment.

• I am also working on a sound engine (YSE), with DSP capabilities. Although the engine provides a lot of classes for DSP development, this was not enough. Written in C++, the engine is very capable of fast DSP processing. But recompiling the code is needed for every change. When prototyping, this is not efficient. I ended up adding a patcher system to YSE, but it needed an interface and this is the result.

• YSE also has a C# wrapper. But writing DSP code in a managed environment is a no-go. Again, a patcher system was the obvious answer for that.

• I am working on an interactive environment in C# (Interact). One of the features I intend to include is sending DSP audio instructions directly to smartphones on a WIFI network. LibPD was a possibility here, but then I could not use my own sound engine which also includes other features i would like to use. It would also mean that patches should be created in Pure Data and not in the Interact environment i was working on. That is undesirable because quick changes to the patch and instant reuploading to the mobile devices would not be possible. Yap is designed in a way to facilitate adding the interface to any C# project and will be used with Interact.

• I found that a visual programming environment is not readily available as a nuGet package. So I set out to create the main yap interface as a view (based on SkiaSharp) and make it publicly available. The package can also be used with other audio and video engines, once the callbacks are in place. (Which is rather easy to do, if you take the source of yap as an example.)