Audio Compressor, Limiter and Clipper for Android and iOS: Superpowered Audio Engine Update

Gabor Szanto

Follow @szantog

This is a tremendous update for Superpowered. We have something for everyone with the latest package:

New Features

Introducing Superpowered Dynamics with 3 new features: a compressor, a limiter and a clipper.

The new Superpowered Clipper class implements a hard-knee clipper with adjustable threshold and maximum decibel settings. You can prevent clipping in your audio stream with this super lightweight feature, which runs 3 times faster than a simple filter!

The new Superpowered Compressor is a classic all-round compressor with very low distortion, a nice curve and many settings: input and output gain, dry/wet, attack and release times, ratio, threshold. It also has an adjustable high-pass filter for the sidechain! The Superpowered Compressor needs less than 1 kb of memory and has 0 latency (of course!). It’s very CPU friendly, requiring just 5x CPU compared to a SuperpoweredFilter.

The new Superpowered Limiter provides amazing sound even when you are crushing it to -40 db. You can set the ceiling, threshold and release. It’s very friendly with any device with very low memory usage (below 1 kb), and it uses just 2.5x CPU compared to SuperpoweredFilter (great power savings!).

Support for the Native Instruments Stems format with super high performance. To re-create the exact same sound designed in the Stems Creator tool by an audio engineer or musician, the sound of the SuperpoweredCompressor and SuperpoweredLimiter is closely matched to the sound of the original compressor and limiter by Native Instruments.

We have no doubt, that the SuperpoweredDecoder, SuperpoweredCompressor and SuperpoweredLimiter supercharges the Native Instruments Stems format with much higher processing speed and lower battery usage.

The SuperpoweredAnalyzer can find and return with the stream of bass and mid keys, to extract bass and melody notes from the source audio stream.

The new SuperpoweredWaveform class offers an even higher performance way over the SuperpoweredAnalyzer to return simpler waveform data, based on the peak volume.

Improvements

Xcode 7 support with separately built iOS and OSX binaries.

The SuperpoweredFlanger uses the SuperpoweredClipper now to prevent audio spikes.

The SuperpoweredDecoder returns with various Native Instruments Stems data (colors, names, settings). You can set which stems track should it decode. These changes are reflected in the SuperpoweredAdvancedAudioPlayer class as well.

The offline example project has been extended with a simple decode >>> filter >>> save-to-WAV example.

Android Improvements

64-bit Intel Android support.

Android Studio does not offer complete native/C++ support with static libraries, still. (We checked, that's the official statement by it’s creators too.)

We tried the new “experimental” Gradle system and hacked really hard to find a way. Having the nice new C++ support and even building with Superpowered is possible, so it’s almost there. But building for multiple architectures with static libraries is not possible with the experimental Gradle system currently.

SuperpoweredAndroidAudioIO is now lock free to prevent dropouts due priority inversion on poorly configured Android devices. It also has an alternative “separate processing thread” option for very old or very badly configured Android devices.

Updated Android example projects to 32-bit ARM, 64-bit ARM, 32-bit Intel and 64-bit Intel architectures, with a little path setting help for Windows users.