## libsamplerate

In This Posting, I gave much thought, to how the ‘Digital Audio Workstation’ named QTractor might hypothetically do a sample-rate conversion.

I thought of several combinations, of “Half-Band Filters” that are based on the Sinc Function, and ‘Polynomial Smoothing’. The latter possibility would have often caused a computational penalty. But there was one, simpler combination of methods, which I did not think of.

QTractor uses a GPL Linux library named ‘libsamplerate‘. Its premise starts out with the idea, that a number of Half-Band Filters can be applied in correct sequences with 2x oversampling or 2x down-sampling, to achieve a variety of effects.

But then, ‘libsamplerate‘ does something ingenious in its simplicity: A Linear Interpolation! Linear interpolation will not offer as clean a spectrum as polynomial smoothing will in one step. But then, this library makes up for that, by just offering a finer resolution of oversampling, if the client application chooses it.

This library offers three quality levels:

1. SRC_SINC_FASTEST
2. SRC_SINC_MEDIUM_QUALITY
3. SRC_SINC_BEST_QUALITY

Now, in This Posting, I identified an additional issue which arises, when we are doing an “Arbitrary Re-Sampling” and down-sampling. This issue was, that the source stream contains frequency components that are higher than the output stream Nyquist Frequency, and which need to be eliminated, even though the output stream is not in sync with the source stream.

To the best of my understanding, this problem can be solved, by making a temporary output stream 2x as fast as the final output stream, and then down-sampling by a factor of 2 again…

Sincerely,

Dirk

(Edit 07/21/2016 : ) The ‘GPL’ requires that this library be kept as free software, because it is in the nature of the GPL license, that any work derived from the code must also stay GPL, which stands of the “General Public License”.

But, because the possibility exists of some commercial exploitation being sought after, the Open-Source Software movement allows for a type of license, which is called the ‘LGPL’, which stands for the “Lesser General Public License”. The LGPL will allow for some software to be derived from the original code, which can be migrated into the private domain, so that the author of the derived code may close their source-code and sell their product for profit.

There exists a library similar to this one, that is named ‘libresample‘, with the express purpose that that one be LGPL code.

Yet, the authors of ‘libsamplerate‘ believe that this GPL version of the library is the superior one, which they would therefore have kept in the public domain.