LADSPA Wave Sculpting Plugins documentation

WASP stands for "WAve Sculpting Plugins". It is a growing collection of software plugins written according to the LADSPA standard, which can be used in a very wide range of applications including audio editors, synthesisers and effect processors. All the processors and generators in the WASP set include two variants - mono and stereo.

WASP doesn't have any sophisticated plugins (yet), but it does fill the gap in the variety of currently-available LADSPA sets. The plugins are pretty simple, but very useful in many situations. For example, here you will find a non-linear amplifier with various transmission curves - from round and parabolic to sine and non-linear sine - which can be used to create a wide variety of interesting and even unique distortion effects. Also there are some nice plugins like hard clipping booster and noisifier.

All plugins in the WASP set have been thoroughly tested with the following LADSPA hosts:

If you ever encounter a problem with any plugin in the WASP set, or have some idea or suggestion for an improvement or a new plugin - please do not hesitate to let me know by sending an e-mail from the ArtemioLabs web site.

I would like to thank the following people for helping me develop my own LADSPA plugin set in this or that way:

It is obvious that if you want to use the plugins in the WASP set, you need to have at least one host application installed on your system. The list of most popular software with LADSPA support is there at the LADSPA web site.

If you will be building WASP from source, you will need the standard set of development tools (C compiler, C library and header files and the make utility) which are part of the very most of distributions. The LADSPA SDK (which basically is the ladspa.h) is included with WASP.

It is always better to compile WASP from source, unless your system doesn't allow you to compile anything due to lack of the standard development tools. In order to build and install the plugins, launch a terminal application and issue the following commands (we assume the archive you downloaded is named wasp-x.x.x.tar.bz2):

bash$ tar -xvf wasp-x.x.x.tar.bz2 | bzip2 -d
bash$ cd wasp-x.x.x
bash$ make
bash$ su -c "make install"

To uninstall the plugins:

bash$ su -c "make uninstall"

The Wave Sculpting Plugins are also available as a pre-bulit Mandriva RPM package. However, it should work on virtually any other distribution since the package only contains the shared plugin libraries and in general you should be able to install and use it on other RPM-based systems like Red Hat, Fedora Core, SuSE, etc.

You can install the WASP RPM package by clicking it in a file manager. Then, depending on your distibution and desktop environment, a package management application should appear (e.g. DrakRPM, KPackage, GnoRPM) and lead you through a few steps to install the RPM. If you do not have any graphical package manager, you can install easily this RPM from the command line (let's assume it's named wasp-x.x.x.i586.rpm):

bash$ su root
bash$ rpm -i wasp-x.x.x.i586.rpm

To uninstall the plugins RPM:

bash$ su root
bash$ rpm -e wasp-x.x.x.i586.rpm

In addition to the complete source code and Mandriva RPM, WASP is also available as a "generic" pre-built binary backage. As it contains only shared plugin libraries, you should be able to install and use it on virtually any distribution.

In order to install the pre-compiled plugins, simply launch a terminal application and issue the following commands (we assume the archive you downloaded is named wasp-x.x.x-bin.tar.bz2):

bash$ tar -xvf wasp-x.x.x-bin.tar.bz2 | bzip2 -d
bash$ cd wasp-x.x.x-bin
bash$ su -c "make install"

To uninstall the plugins:

bash$ su -c "make uninstall"

The signal is routed into a non-linear pre-amplifier with round curve and then fed into a clipping signal booster with gain of up to 36 dB. This plugin is perfectly suitable for producing very hard clipping overdrive/distortion effects.

This effect produces amplitude modulation to the input signal using a variable noise source (which works exactly like the Variable Noise generator in this plugin set). Very useful for creating various noisy/shadow sounds.

X-Shaper an advanced wave shaper with multiple curve (transfer function) types each of which can be shaped with the Curve parameter. The X-Shaper can produce a very wide variety of really interesting wave shaping effects - from simple to pretty complex. In addition, it contains two LFOs with selectable waveforms and adjustable rates (0.01 to 10 Hz) that can modulate signal gain (LFO1) and curve form (LFO2) - for even more sonic possibilities.

The effect produced by the selected shaper type can be smoothly and drastically varied by the Curve parameter, which, when tweaked in real-time or modulated by LFO2, gives very interesting morphing harmonic distrotions. Note that since the curves of the shapers are very complex, the shapers are very sensitive to the input signal level and spectral characteristics.

In order to discover the possibilities of the X-Shaper, use apply it on a sine wave and fiddle with all parameters.

Figure 1. X-Shaper structure

Noise source which can generate white, digital and shot noise. It works in two modes: "hold" (random level is generated and held until the next generation) and "shot" (random level is generated and the level is held at zero until the next generation). The distance between neighboring random level generations is controlled with the Density parameter. When Density is at 0 you get white noise with both noise modes. Decreasing Density will give you digital noise with "hold" noise type and rarefied shot noise with the "shot" type.