A simple Python library for generating wavetables for software synthesisers. makewaves creates a WAV file formatted as a wavetable from an array of functions producing the individual waveform cycles to put in the wavetable. The WAV file consists of one cycle of each waveform, at a standard length.
The following example generates a wavetable consisting of sine, triangle, sawtooth and square waves in that order (equivalent to the “Basic Shapes” wavetable in the Ableton Wavetable instrument) and writes it to the file wavetable.wav:
import math
import makewaves
waves = [
# sine
lambda p: math.sin(p*2*math.pi),
# triangle
lambda p: (4*p) * (p>0.25 and p<=0.75 and -1 or 1) + (p>0.75 and -4 or (p>0.25 and 2) or 0),
# sawtooth
lambda p: (((p+0.5)*2)%2)-1,
# square
lambda p: p<0.5 and 1 or -1,
]
makewaves.make_wavetable("wavetable.wav", waves)makewaves contains one function: make_wavetable. This function takes the following arguments:
file(required): The output file to write the wavetable to. This is either a string containing a path or a writeable file-like object (as accepted by thewavemodule)waves(required): An array of functions that generate waveforms. Each function takes one input: afloatphase value from 0 to 1, and for each phase returns an amplitude value from -1 to 1. Each function is called to generate one cycle for the wavetable.wave_samples(optional; default is 1024): the number of samples each cycle consists of. For most systems this will be a power of two. Ableton Live's Wavetable instrument (with which this was tested) uses 1024; while Xfer Serum uses 2048 and u-he Hive can use a variety of values specified in the filename.
makewaves was developed on Python 3.9 (i.e., the system Python on macOS 13.4.1), though should run on most recent Python 3.x versions.
Andrew Bulhak (https://github.com/andrewcb/)