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Digital Audio with Java, by Craig Lindley, is a delightful book about actually doing something with Java. In this case what gets done is that a lot of nice digital sound Java beans with neat studio-like visual controls get built.
Lindley, who started his career carrying sound equipment on his back, later moved on to designing sound equipment for recording studios and now writes digital sound applications in Java. Like all empiricists, Lindley is serving soup. This is not the book I'd recommend to teach you DSP math. It's not the book I'd point you to for learning the physics of sound. It's not the book I'd hand you for learning Java or coding style or scientific programming. Yet all those elements are economically present in Digital Audio with Java, in the hurried snatches the working programmer grabs on the job.
There are three useful aspects to this book.
The CD-ROM that accompanies Digital Audio with Java contains the source for the classes and applications Lindley describes in the book. The classes range from the low-level signal algorithms, such as oscillators, filters, compressors, and reverb, to GUI controls such as a spectrum analyzer, a guitar tuner, and a phrase sampler. These are the most fun code samples I've reviewed in a Java book to date.
Immediately before publishing, Lindley rushed to include one supplementary chapter with source code to illustrate the just-released Java Media Framework, JMF 2.0. One or two of the source files don't compile under the latest JMF pre-release: Sun added a Listener interface to some classes. I coded in stub routines for adding listeners in one or two places and the code compiled and ran.
If you are looking for good advanced practical Java book and happen additionally to be interested in or entertained by digital sound, Digital Audio with Java may well be the best cross-product of fun and pedagogy this season.
-- Jack J. Woehr (http://www.well.com/~jax/)
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