Re: [linux-audio-dev] time stretching and compression under Linux ?

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Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] time stretching and compression under Linux ?
From: Paul Davis (pbd_AT_Op.Net)
Date: Mon Nov 12 2001 - 01:51:05 EET


>yes, its weird, and its unorthodox.. but it might just work ;)

i don't mean to sound mean, or nasty, or anything like that, but i
just think this is stupid.

i can't remember if i've told people on the story of when i worked on
an automated film sorter. it was a custom built thing, driven with
pneumatic gates and IR detection systems. i wrote the device driver
for the i/o board that connected up all the sensors and controls, and
then the application that ran the thing. anyway, the company didn't
want to spend much on the IR sensors, so they got some cheap ones. it
turned out that they had generated false triggers and sometimes failed
to trigger. no problem, said the company, they were cheap enough that
we installed two at every location, and i'd write code to double check
everything. in addition, i wrote code that used a relaxation algorithm
to heuristically determine if it was really likely that a trigger had
just fired again so soon after the last one.

it was wierd, it was unorthodox, and in that case, it was definitely
absolutely and utterly stupid. of course, it worked. kind of. sort
of. as well as it could have, given the h/w.

3 months after i had been paid to put in about 20 hours on these
workarounds at the going device driver/kernel/application consultant
rate, they threw the cheap IR sensors away and bought decent IR
sensors. it cost them a little under half what they paid me to write
the software workaround.

i've never forgotten that lesson. i will not use software to
compensate for fundamentally inadequate h/w, and in your case, use SB
cards, let alone 2 of them running without word clock, definitely
constitutes "inadequate". you might get this to work. i don't dispute
that. but you'll be wasting someone's time who could be writing cool
plugins, porting libvstgui, helping to extend MusE, GLAME, Ardour or
any of the other many cool projects we have floating around here.

and i don't mean that nastily, really. its just that life is short,
and there are much better things for coders to be working than making
cheap h/w look like a cheap imitation of decent stuff.

--p


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