NASPRO, recursive acronym for "NASPRO Architecture for Sound PROcessing", is a free/open source, modular and cross-platform software architecture to perform sound processing with a strong emphasys on interoperability.

Its main aim is to provide users and developers a set of full-featured tools to do sound manipulation using heterogeneous technologies which are already available (such as LADSPA or LV2) and at the same time make it easy to develop new ones without breaking interoperability.

Please, keep in mind that it is work in progress and that we're in early stages of development.

NASPRO for end users

Once installed, the most visible benefit brought by NASPRO to your system is allowing you to use plugins developed for certain applications on other applications.

The following screenshots are an example of what NASPRO can already do: they show the audacious media player running instances of LADSPA plugins as if they were native and the JACK Rack LADSPA host running audacious' effect plugins.

Nice, isn't it? ;-)

NASPRO for programmers

At the moment of writing NASPRO isn't probably of great interest to application developers, since it already does plugin bridging transparently to the usual plugin interfaces.

However there are plans to develop a couple of things which could let you consider using it directly in the future: one might be proper semantic metadata retrieving (short term), another is the implementation of a set of tools on the top of the low-level NASPRO libraries to ease development of complex sound processing applications, such as a gstreamer-like sound processing library (long term).

In any case, NASPRO core libraries are entirely developed in quasi-strict ISO/ANSI C (ISO/IEC 9899:1990, also known as C89) and contains little OS-, compiler- and CPU-specific code, which is clearly separated from the rest.

NASPRO for sound processing technology developers

Whether you are developing or maintaining support for some sound processing plugin API or wish to define a file format to represent audio filters, NASPRO can already be of great help to make your work interoperable with existing technology: you only have to write a NASPRO module and, if possible, some "back bridge" to your technology and you're done.

It will be even more convenient in the future, since, as said before, new tools built on top of the low-level NASPRO libraries will enable features like (hopefully) autogenerated GUIs, data streaming, session handling and whatnot, without requiring any effort on your side.

So, stay tuned! ;-)

NASPRO for scientists/researchers

Scientists and/or researchers in the audio field who are not programmers could find NASPRO to be of great help, since it is one of the goals of the NASPRO project to make it easier to develop sound processing components as, for example, textual or binary files, which could be created either manually or via general- or special-purpose scientific software.

In this regard we already started developing, as a Google Summer of Code 2008 project, a textual file format called NDF (NASPRO Digital Filter) to represent FIR and IIR sound processing filters given their impulse responses. Support for the first version (0.1) of this file format is available since the 0.1.1 release.

Oddities

The project name comes from the word "naspro" found in some southern Italian idioms, pronounced nasproh or 'nnashproh. The naspro is a traditional Southern Italian icing used for sweets.