circuit simulation with audio output?

[dentaku]

Multisim has a speaker out device that lets you play back the results of a simulation as audio. It takes quite a while to render just a second of audio depending on how you have the maximum timesptep set to but that's to be expected.
Are there other, not incredibly expensive, programs that do the same thing?

I wish Circuit Wizard did this.

[GK]

LTspice - it's free.

Wavein and waveout spice directives.


You can even import audio recordings, pass them through your simulated whatever (effects unit, amplifer, etc) and record the output back to a *.wav file.

[Rigby]

OK, that is neat.  I didn't know that.

Easy way to demo high and low pass filtering.

[dentaku]

LTspice - it's free.

Wavein and waveout spice directives.


You can even import audio recordings, pass them through your simulated whatever (effects unit, amplifer, etc) and record the output back to a *.wav file.

I had read a bit about LTspice and the waveout and it looked clumsy but I just found the waveout example file in the Educational folder and it's really not bad.
I still haven't been able to make a valid .wav file from anything but the example file but hopefully I'll figure it out myself.

I hate designing stuff in LTSpice though. It's the clumsiest old fashioned interface I've seen in a long time.

[rs20]

LTspice - it's free.

Wavein and waveout spice directives.


You can even import audio recordings, pass them through your simulated whatever (effects unit, amplifer, etc) and record the output back to a *.wav file.

I had read a bit about LTspice and the waveout and it looked clumsy but I just found the waveout example file in the Educational folder and it's really not bad.
I still haven't been able to make a valid .wav file from anything but the example file but hopefully I'll figure it out myself.

I hate designing stuff in LTSpice though. It's the clumsiest old fashioned interface I've seen in a long time.

You're talking about taking a waveform and saving it as a .wav file. That's not fundamentally a new feature at all, just a different output format for the transient graph. So it stands to reason that it's going to be a thin, simple, possibly clumsy-looking shim.

LTSpice is probably one of my favourite interfaces. Everything's just an F-something key away. I guess there is quite a learning curve before those F-keys are burned into your memory, though.

[dentaku]

I just tried it again using the astable.asc example file and managed to get a working .wav file out of it. I can see this being useful.

I wish I could output circuit wizard files as something ltspice compatible because re-building a circuit in LTSpice is a chore considering it doesn't even follow standard keyboard shortcuts for CUT,COPY,PASTE, UNDO and my keyboard only has F1 to F6 (F7 to F12 only work with the Fn key pressed)

[dentaku]

I've been messing with LTSpice some more lately and I customized the hotkeys so CTRL-Z/CTL-SHIFT-Z works then changed the hotkey for MOVE plus last night I found that I had installed a model for a potentiometer a while ago and forgot about it then learned how to use it. I hate using 2 resistors to represent a pot.
The .wave out works very well too as long as you keep it in the 800mV p-p range.

This is where this old 1983-ish circuit comes from.
http://electro-music.com/forum/topic-28447.html

Here's what the old Hip Bass Drum circuit sounds (and looks) like from LTSpice. I still have to replace all those ugly resistor dividers with real pots now that I now how to do it.

[Zero999]

I've played around with a similar circuit before. It's basically an oscillator with damping. It the components are changed to give a higher frequency, with less damping, it sounds like a bell.

[dentaku]

Yeah, I see what you mean. Of course nothing beats an FM synth for bell sounds though.
It's amazing how simple the Hip Bass Drum is and that it has so many controls (even if some are very subtle).

I'm definitely going to build it for real when I have time.

Just for reference if someone finds this thread in the future, I'm posting an updated image of what it looks like in LTSpice now that I've figured out how to use pots and I fixed a connection that I had wrong in my first image.

I've played around with a similar circuit before. It's basically an oscillator with damping. It the components are changed to give a higher frequency, with less damping, it sounds like a bell.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Feed in some Justin Bieber music(?).

Any output would have to be better.

[SquidCap]

Just to bring up this necro, LiveSpice is non-functional on any win7 or newer and no one is interested on fixing that part of it (the only interest is for VST compile functions and even that is practically dead). It is practically dead and is hanging on one bug (asio.dll doesn't work since it is compiled with vista32 bit and thus all files are from that..) so if anyone has talent, there is a program that is just waiting for revival.

[Zero999]

Just to bring up this necro, LiveSpice is non-functional on any win7 or newer and no one is interested on fixing that part of it (the only interest is for VST compile functions and even that is practically dead). It is practically dead and is hanging on one bug (asio.dll doesn't work since it is compiled with vista32 bit and thus all files are from that..) so if anyone has talent, there is a program that is just waiting for revival.

Windows 7 comes with a Windows XP emulator (basically XP running on MS VPC) so you could try that. If you're on Windows 10, then you'll need to download VirtualBox or similar and install XP on that.