Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Support code for synthesis?
From: Paul Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Mon Nov 05 2001 - 02:17:22 EET
>2. LAAGA, JACK, MAIA etc (www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/resourcesapi.php3)
>- different names for various future extensions to LADSPA that support
>the connection of higher level components (and possibly events too).
>Nothing seems to be finalised or widely supported.
and not relevant to your goals at this time, although it will be very
shortly.
>Incidentally, this seems to be a completely different community from
>linux-audio-dev. Was there some horrible split that separated the
>two, or is it a Euro/USA thing?
not that we know of. 50% of the main posters on LAD are in europe, and
aRts main developer is on LAD. but i think that some people have
convinced themselves that aRts is the right environment in which to do
everything they plan on doing, and they are very active on the
relevant email lists. LAD tends to be full of people who don't see
single systems (yet) that offer the kind of solutions they need, and
so tend to focus on designing either their own, or high-level systems
like JACK.
>4. cSound, PD, jMax (use google!) - dedicated languages/environments
>for sound synthesis. Live-performance oriented offspring of research
>projects. JMax is Java based and therefore not yet as fast as PD or
>cSound.
this is not true. jMax uses Java for its user interface. the audio
engine is all written in C. this is a very smart way to write such a
program. jMax is at least as fast as Csound or PD for most things that
matter.
PD is more modern but less popular than cSound. They appear
>to have a more monolithic approach (to the code) than LADSPA and more
>decentralised approach (to development) than aRTs.
Max, which is a blood-cousin of PD and jMax, is arguably more popular
than CSound. It has certainly had more commercial visiblity.
>config or data dumps for later display cumbersome). cSound et al
[ mention of sprawling linux programs ]
Csound and PD/jMax are *extremely* different programs. they should
not be compared. I have worked extensively with the source of Csound
and have browsed both PD and jMax quite a bit. There is no similarity
between them in any sense at all except in some high level description
of what they do. it is relatively simple to extend and add stuff to PD
and jMax at the source code level. its much harder (for many people,
probably impossible) to do so with Csound, even though the mechanics
of writing new opcodes is fairly simple, and writing new instruments
is rather well documented in the voluminous "The Csound Book" (more
than 500 pages IIRC) and really quite productive for a lot of people.
>knowledge). So I'm left with aRTs or IIWUSynth (or similar). aRTs
i suppose that just in passing i should mention Quasimodo
(http://quasimodo.org/). i say in passing, because quasimodo is more
or less a dead project. it had ambitious goals (much more ambitious
than yours, i think), but there were some bad design/procedural
decisions along the way and i painted it into a corner from there was
no particularly pretty escape. some parts of it may be resuscitated in
connection with ardour.
>seems like it's more general and heading for success - but I'm left
>wondering why I've seen no mention of it here over the last few
>weeks...
speaking for myself, i have never been able to "grok" aRts, even
though i know that stefan has done some really interesting work on
it. we don't talk about aRts in terms of its sound-server abilities
much because many of us here have a strong interest in low
latency/real time situations, and unless you write your synthesis
module as an in-process plugin for aRts (and perhaps not even then),
aRts isn't capable of being used as a "sound server" in a low latency
situation (at least, it wasn't the last time we talked about it).
--p
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