About Calf Studio Gear

Concept

Calf Studio Gear is designed to bring you a professional experience in music production to your free operating system. State-of-the-art effects and sound generators with a well designed user interface take open source audio processing to the next level.

The Calf plugins include all todays frequently used studio effects along with some feature-rich sound processors. As active development goes further this package will grow in functionality over the time.

Calf Studiogear is designed to run under the most flexible plugin standard in Linux, namely LV2. So you're able to insert them in lots of plugin-capable audio software like Ardour, Rosegarden and others.

The Calf Rack offers you all Calf effects and synthesizers in an easy-to-use studio rack. Wire the effects trough Jack to build your own studio environment and trigger the sound processors live or though a MIDI sequencer or tracker.

Calf Studiogear is designed to be most flexible and wide-range in sound. That aspect sometimes decreases usability since all those one-knob-fits-all-effects are normally way to restricted in functionality and flexibility for professional audio production. Therefore Calf sometimes offers derivates with decreased but specialized functionality for a narrow range of jobs. Examples are the Exciter and Bass Enhancer plugs which are based on Saturator but offering a limited amount of control to make life easier on everyday tasks.

The minimum or maximum settings of those derivates are mostly increased in range compared to commercial plugin suites to achieve a specialized interface with less limitations in usability and sound.

"You should decide your options, sound and workflow, not your money bag!" is exactly what Calf stands for.

Website: calf.sourceforge.net
Sourceforge: sourceforge.net/projects/calf

Development

• Calf Studiogear is researched, developed, programmed and designed by:
• Krzysztof Foltman: The head of Calf. Krzysztof is a professional programmer for [...], loves making music and lives in Poland. He once initiated this project in 19xx and is the main developer of the Calf codebase. The most DSP routines and all delay effects are implemented by him and he designed the complete framework Calf is based on. The synthesizers of Calf are designed by him, too. Krzysztof also maintains the Git-repository and keeps an eye on clean code, fast and effective routines and the implementation of enhancements to the framework.
• Markus Schmidt: A german designer, producer, musician and programmer. He's the latest member of the team and signs responsible for the design of every optical aspect of Calf. He also added a lot of audio production plugins based on his everyday work in his studio like the enhanced dynamics modules based on Thor's routine, the equalizers based on Krzysztof's filters, the pulsator and the different saturation effects based on Tom's distortion code from TAP plugins.
  
• Christian Holschuh: As a great mathematician he is one of the core developers of the lookahead limiter routine and the multiband limiter solution. He was asked by Markus if he would join the development of the limiter routine because of his mathematical and physical knowledge.
• Thor Harald Johanssen: He is responsible for the development of the dynamics routine all Calf plugins are based on. A lot of discussions with Krzysztof and an intensive brainstorming lead to one of the best and most flexible level detection and gain reduction modules for audio production. His routine drives plugins like compressors, limiters and envelope modulated effects.
• Tom Szilagyi: He is the main developer of the TAP-plugin pack available for Linux audio workstations. His distortion routine taken from his plugins is the base for every saturation effect like Saturator, Exciter or Bass Enhancer. He gladly gave his code to the Calf team which pushed quality and functionality of Calf a lot.

Support

Participate

You have some crazy and well planned ideas for sound processing based on the Calf framework? Great!

Since Calf is open source everyone is invited to enhance the codebase, add some functionality or write new plugins. If you have no programming experience perhaps the team of Calf is fascinated by your idea and will implement it. But please don't walk around on their nerves while you are waiting for an answer, all those guys have a life ,)

If you have some experience with C++ (or maybe other programming languages like python, pearl, C, ...) and your brain doesn't implode on heavy abstraction then it is quite easy to add new plugins to Calf. A complete documentation of the framework is still missing but work is in progress. Hold it with 9/11: ask questions - demand answers.

You know how to layout a website and have heard from GTK once? Become a GUI designer - since the frontends of Calf are layouted in typical XML language.

Copyright

Calf Studiogear is mainly released under GPL and partially under LGPL license. It offers you the possibility to change the codebase or redistribute it to the public under the same conditions.

For more information please visit www.gnu.org.