The purpose of this page is to provide questions asked by someone about Whisper, and questions that you'd probably ask anyway, together with the corresponding answers, so that there would be no need to ask the same questions again. If you have a question that is not otherwise answered on the website, and you think it's an important one to ask, you can use the email address given at the bottom of the page.
Whisper is still quite limited in its functionality, and the usage model is very different from most other sequencing tools, so if you tried it, you would probably have to learn a new way to write music in a sequencer, and have the patience to use the software even if some functionality is missing. That said, it could definitely be worth a try, if you're interested.
Whisper is currently available "on demand", so you might be able to get it by sending email to the address given on the contact page. When requesting download access, please tell us a bit of yourself and the computing environment where you'd like to try Whisper (plus what you'd like to use it for).
1) Windows 7, Vista or XP (32- or 64-bit). 2) ASIO drivers for an installed sound device (preferably native). 3) A well-performing dual- or multicore processor. 4) At least 2GB of main memory.
Whisper requires Windows 7, Vista or XP, on a computer with an ASIO audio driver (and corresponding audio hardware). Without ASIO support, you can't use Whisper.
Some releases of Whisper have been successfully tested with ASIO4All (and some generic integrated audio hardware) and a couple of natively ASIO-supporting devices, but a specific ASIO-compatible sound card or audio interface may or may not work with it in its current state. ASIO4All should help with most audio devices, though, as it's a wrapper type "generic" ASIO driver that brings ASIO support to many devices that don't have native ASIO drivers available.
The current Whisper builds also require an SSE2-supporting CPU, but the CPUs that are powerful enough to be actually usable should already have that (SSE2 is supported by most mainstream CPUs starting from Pentium 4s and Athlon 64s). The better-sounding VST plugins often need more processing power than the worse sounding ones anyway (not always, though), and Whisper can't make the plugins faster than they are, so more processing power is always better than less.
Whisper's audio performance is currently mostly ok in both multicore and single core systems, but the UI has some performance issues, which are making it more difficult to use many of the more performance-hungry instruments and effects, when you are navigating the UI at the same time. Currently it's recommended to use Whisper on at least a dual-core CPU because of that, and the application is anyway designed for parallel processing, so using a single-core CPU is not that effective. That said, there should be no other major issues with single-core CPUs than the more limited power they provide for the plugins (you can use less plugins simultaneously with a single-core CPU than a CPU with more cores, or a multiprocessor machine).
At least 2GB of main memory is also something that is recommended, especially in Windows Vista.
On the OS side, Whisper should work in Windows XP (SP2) or later, but anything below that is at least not "officially" supported.
An optional MIDI controller can be used for additional precision in note input etc., but it is not required for using the software.
Whisper is built using Windows SDK 6.1, but the required parts of the runtime libraries are built in, so no additional DLL files etc. should be required on user's machine. The installation process requires Windows Installer (version 3.1 should probably be enough), but that should basically also be present in at least any properly updated Vista-based PC.
Whisper has some known issues, of which there's a (usually quite up-to-date) list included in the HTML documentation. Consult the documentation (included in the software package) for more details. Currently there are no big issues open, but as the application is being used more, those might appear. There are of course some known limitations in what the software can do, etc., though.
Whisper is mostly developed by just one person as an amateur project in his spare time, sometimes with help from a few other people. This often means that progress is slow, but it also means that the design and implementation of the application is in tighter control, and that the project really is based on personal interest and motivation. So, when there is progress, that comes from actual enthusiasm towards the subject, and the application maybe doesn't include as many compromises as it would if the development team was larger. Hopefully the quality of the application will be good enough also for other people too, even if the resources available for development are very scarce.
The current intention is to make and keep Whisper freeware, but not open source.
Whisper is a small and specialised project that comes from personal interests, and there are already many open source projects which are working on music creation software. So far there has been quite little interest to make Whisper open source, and open source development has its own complications as well. You must remember that Whisper is relying heavily on the proprietary VST and ASIO technologies, for which the SDK source code can't be given to people who have not signed a licensing agreement with Steinberg. If you want to open the sources, it means that you have to separate the source code very clearly to parts involved more closely with VST and ASIO, and parts which are not specific to the used proprietaty technologies, and which do not contain any source code from the SDKs. You can only open-source the latter parts.
Making software open source also involved even more work with licensing etc. than what you have with "non-open source software", and it's just not feasible to do all the extra work right now to make Whisper open source. Even if software is of good quality, it's still another thing if the source code of that software is commonly readable and reusable enough to be made openly available. Currently Whisper is very much work-in-progress, and even though the quality is now on a beta level, the source would not really be ready yet for releasing under an open source license (even if the proprietary parts were clearly separated).
We also like to keep the development "coherent" and quite streamlined, and while open source software projects are a nice thing as such, and while they often let people create interesting software, it also needs quite a lot of extra work and attention to organize such projects so that the results of different people's work actually also give benefit to the original project. While open-sourcing Whisper could give people some more code to use when developing music applications, there is already other such code available. Whisper has been pretty much entirely written "from scratch" (other than the licensed code from the proprietary VST, ASIO and Windows SDKs and ZLib), and the code might therefore be a bit less familiar and a bit more difficult to work with for people outside of the project anyway.
Summing it up, we don't think that open-sourcing Whisper would currently be "worth the hassle", as it probably wouldn't benefit the project itself very much, and the code from Whisper would probably not be very directly usable for other people either. We could perhaps take a few more people to work with the project, though, if they also signed the license agreements required, but we'd still like to keep the development team quite small, so that the people involved are more familiar with each other, and have common goals for their work.
No, and yes. The recent Intel-based Mac hardware is quite much the same as any PC hardware, and you can run Windows on it, so you can (at least in principle) also run Whisper on a Mac. But: you can't run Whisper in Mac OS X, which is the OS most people mainly use on their Macs. And because of that, you can't use any plugins installed on the Mac OS side with Whisper, but have to install the plugins (also) on the Windows side.
Macs also have traditionally quite different user interfaces than Windows PCs in the way that for example the mouses only have one button by default. To me, this feels quite impractical, as you can't use your mouse hand as effectively to control things with a one-button mouse as you can with a two-button one. With "out-of-the-box" Macs you will need to resort to using your other hand on the keyboard in combination with the mouse, whereas for example in Whisper you'd like to use your other hand to input notes instead of giving extra keypresses to support the use of the mouse. Whisper also makes good use of the mouse wheel that is a standard component in the mouses of Windows PCs, but is missing from Macs, probably mainly because of styling and tradition.
The Whisper UI is originally designed for two-button mouses with mouse wheels, and will need some refactoring to be good for one-button mouses as well. It's also possible that proper use of Whisper will also on Mac computers require you to purchase a two-button mouse with a mouse wheel.
It would certainly be interesting to make Whisper work in Mac OS X, too, as Macs are very much used in music creation, and the OS is nice too, but right now the main goal is just to make Whisper work properly, so that it's usable at least in the Windows environment. In this phase, it's not very practical to buy or borrow Mac hardware just for doing the porting (which also takes lots of additional time and effort).
Probably not. Of course that depends on how you define music, and a newbie. Getting used to Whisper might take some time, at least if you're not familiar with tracker software, or even music software in general. The application has some additional aid for people who are not so familiar with music, like a way to use modes/scales/chords somehow without really knowing so much about them. But, there aren't so many Whisper users so far, so there are not much statistics on how simple or difficult it is to learn.
Probably it can take some time to learn to use Whisper, as it has its own thinking structure compared to most other sequencers, but when you have learned the basics, it should be fairly straightforward and logical to use (hopefully).
That's another interesting question, as an experienced musician most probably has experience on things that are quite different from Whisper. If you haven't used a tracker application at some point, you might not be so familiar with entering notes and values in columns, for instance. Instead, you might be more familiar with a piano roll approach. There are also other things that might be quite different with Whisper than with the more popular music creation tools, and especially if you've been playing using physical instruments and recording audio using microphones, line-ins etc., you might need some time to adjust to *writing* music instead.
Unfortunately there is no official support available for Whisper, other than maybe some additional troubleshooting-related documentation made available on this site. The authors of the software do not have extra time to use for supporting the software, especially as long as the software is free to use, and they don't get any money for the work they're doing for it. Even setting up and maintaining a user forum where users of Whisper could help each other would require too much time, energy and money from the point of view of the developers.
There are currently no plans to make Whisper commercial, either, but if that happened, the situation might change.
This basically means that you're on your own in using Whisper. If the provided documentation and information on this site are not enough to help you with some problems you might encounter when using Whisper, and if you can't solve those problems yourself or get help from some other people, you should probably not be using the software.
That depends on your definition of a Buzz clone. The term is often used of any music applications that have been inspired by Buzz, and have some similarities with it. Whisper does have quite a few UI similarities with Buzz, but while it uses the concept of multi-pattern sequencing, and some other UI elements that also Buzz does, it's also quite different from Buzz in how those elements are actually implemented and used in the interface. It isn't a modular synthesizer in itself (like Buzz is), and it's strictly a VST host (which Buzz hasn't traditionally been, without extra plugins for that purpose). Still, if you compare Whisper to both Buzz and some more common music creation software, you will see that Whisper is much more a clone of Buzz than it's a clone of many others. The reasons for why the Whisper UI resembles Buzz UI so much are mostly that
1) We think some things are already done in such a simple way in Buzz that it's not easy to do them simpler. 2) We have used Buzz, and have got used to its UI (although we're actually more used to Whisper now).
The UI can still change quite a lot, and maybe it will not be as suitable to call Whisper a "Buzz clone" in the future as it is now. But still, we like Buzz too, and if that fact itself makes Whisper a "Buzz clone", we're quite happy with it :-)
Whisper is not a typical DAW host application. It's more like a pluggable "music box" for composers than a "full-fledged" audio workstation for whichever audio needs you might have. It's also basically a realtime-only application, which means that while you can store the output in a wave file, the application doesn't have any "offline" audio processing functionality by itself.
The Whisper UI is designed for personal computers, and the intention is not to imitate any physical instruments or studio equipment visually, but to create an UI that gets the most benefit out of being run on a computer. That might create additional challenges if trying to make the UI as good as possible on both PCs and Macs, as they have a bit different input methods etc., and so PC and Mac users might have somewhat different requirements for an UI.
In general, while having animated knobs and such things on the screen might bring a familiar environment to someone who has worked in a "real" physical studio environment, that is not the most practical way to do an UI for a computer application. For example, it's sometimes much more practical to show numerical values in their numerical format (and possibly as sliders instead of rotatable knobs) on a computer screen, and let the user change the values using the mouse wheel on top of them, than to let her/him try to grasp a virtual knob and move the mouse left/right or up/down to rotate it.
It's also good to not have overly much information on the screen at once, but to try to show only the relevant things in the most effective way. What that way is in each situation, is a different question, of course.
If there's another important question that still isn't answered on this page, you can send it to "whisper" at "whispervst.org" (of course you'll need to make that to a full email address by adding the "@" sign in between).