Impromptu Audio, Video & Graphics Programming Environment Officially Released
Impromptu, a free Mac OS X programming environment for composers, sound artists, VJs and graphic artists, has officially been released. Since the beta versions, there are a few new features now included such as support for the extended note API and new OpenGL action, but the build is now performance tested and solid according to the developers. Impromptu is a Scheme language environment, a member of the Lisp family of languages, for live or interactive programming.
Time plays a major role in the Impromptu environment allowing accurate real-time scheduling of events and code. Impromptu is a dynamic environment designed for the creation and manipulation of running programs in live performance.
Impromptu is a programmable AudioUnit host. A powerful environment for creating AudioUnit graphs of arbitrary complexity with precise programmatic control over individual AU nodes. Musical material can be precisely scheduled for performance by any AudioUnit instrument node and parameters, program changes and presets can be programmatically changed on-the-fly as well as directly via the AU’s user interface.
Graphics routines can be applied with the same temporal accuracy as audio material allowing artists to tightly integrate audio and visual components. OpenGL, live video processing, vector drawing routines, image rendering, CoreImage filters, text rendering and quicktime movie support are a few of the graphics features available for artists to play with.
Impromptu also includes a bidirectional ObjC-Bridge allowing Scheme to instantiate and call ObjC objects and ObjC objects to call back into the Scheme interpreter. For those times when only C will do.
Impromptu for Mac OS X (Universal Binary) 10.4 and 10.5 is now available for free. More information on Impromptu .
