Elementary Will Soon Be Open Source

Last year was a really exciting year for Elementary: we saw the announcement of Elementary v1.0, the Discord community grow to over 650 members, awesome community projects spring up like @bgins’ Coincident Spectra and @vewilya’s Pluviat Delay, and uptake from some really exciting companies and teams like Arpeggi.

The end of last year was also a great opportunity for reflection, and for me to clarify my goals with this project. Much of my work in 2022 included efforts to find a sustainable strategy for funding Elementary’s continued development while still enabling new users to pick up the project and evaluate it before committing to any fees. That’s what prompted removing any fee structure around using the library itself, while pairing it with an attempt at building a marketplace for selling paid add-ons.

After reflecting on this past year, my conclusion is that these attempts have also built a sense of hesitation for new users and larger companies– to name two prominent factors: an unfamiliar proprietary license, and no visibility into the core framework to aid in evaluating whether it’s the right fit for certain projects. These hesitations are totally valid, and ultimately they stand in contrast to one of my guiding theses that removing barriers to entry for those users will be a key factor in Elementary’s success.

Hey friends,

Over the course of the past semester, I’ve been working with a team from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) on a tool for applying spatially positioned audio effects to first order ambisonic sound files. Our project, foafx, is the result of months of creative exploration and prototyping that proved to be a wonderful opportunity to leverage Elementary’s strengths.

Our work is available on GitHub at https://github.com/risdsound/foafx, and offers an exciting example of working with multi-channel audio in Elementary as well as ambisonic encoding and decoding. The tool itself is available on the command line from npm, and is documented thoroughly on our GitHub Readme:

npm install -g foafx
foafx --help

Hey dear reader,

It’s been nearly two months since our last newsletter update, and two months is plenty of time to cover a lot of ground. So buckle up, because we’ve got a lot to share!

First, the short version:

Elementary v1.0.0 is here!

Today we’re thrilled to share that Elementary v1.0 is finally available. This change comes after several months of important changes to the core algorithm and user-facing API, but also after many more months of engagement from the wonderful Elementary Audio community helping Elementary settle into a shape that we have full confidence will be both stable and flexible for the long run.

There’s so much to share about what this change entails, but rather than trying to cover each point here, we’ll just focus on some of the highlights. To catch the complete list, check out our newly updated documentation pages and in particular the changelog here.

TypeScript Support

It’s been almost two months since our last community roundup, which means we’re overdue for another round-up of what’s been happening!

Creating an EQ using Elementary and React.js

https://blog.stijn-kuijper.me/2022/01/07/elementary-blog-post/

Stijn Kuijper wrote a brilliant blog post detailing the setup and process of writing an EQ plugin using Elementary. Well worth a read if you’ve been curious about the Elementary Plugin Dev Kit but have not yet given it a try.

We’re kicking off our brand new newsletter with an announcement of Elementary v0.11.0 alongside a new, simplified pricing and licensing model, then following up with a brief look at what’s coming next.

Elementary v0.11.0

The highlight of the v0.11.0 release is the introduction of the FFT processor node el.fft. With the same degree of simplicity and flexibility that you’re used to with the other analysis nodes (el.meter, el.scope, etc) you can now tap any part of your signal chain for real-time frequency domain processing and analysis.