Programmable, open guitar effects processors

[horruh]

I am looking for a programmable guitar effects processor. I have been looking around and found two products: Openstomp and Line6 ToneCore DSP.
Both products seem to be quite difficult to program: the programmer is required to have extensive knowledge/experience with DSP assembly programming and has to be skilled on audio processing.

Does anyone have experience with these, or comparable products?

[Steve Conner]

I've got a ToneCore development kit, and it's pretty agricultural compared to the DSP tools I use in my day job. For instance, the debugging support is: It displays the values of 4 registers.

I never got far with it because I couldn't get the hang of the assembler. I can program the old Analog Devices DSPs and PICs, but 56k assembler is weird. Supposedly you can program the ToneCore in C, but I haven't got round to trying.

If it were me, I'd get the TMS320C6713 evaluation board from Spectrum Digital and build it into a box. It has a reasonable audio codec on there with example code, you can program it in C, and it's floating-point, so you don't have to think too hard about the arithmetic.

If latency were less of an issue, I'd get a laptop with an ASIO audio interface, and write my DSP code as a C program linked against the ASIO library. Last time I checked, you could get the ASIO headers free from Steinberg.

Probably you could run the same C program on either of the above platforms.

No matter what platform you choose, you'll have to know about audio processing. Unless your idea of "programmable" means hooking together effect modules provided by someone else.

The music-dsp mailing list archives are worth a read too.

Spin Semiconductor make programmable audio DSP boards: http://www.spinsemi.com/ One of the technicians at my work got one, and he seemed to be having plenty of fun with it.

[horruh]

thanks

Thanks for your valuable feedback.
What you describe matches exactly with my perception.

Actually, my interest comes from the fact that I am developing my own audio signal processing technology. My goal is to create my own versatile guitar effects processor, and make it a commercial product if there is sufficient interest.

I have opened a new thread on this topic.