Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] Poll about linux music audio app usability
From: David Olofson (david_AT_gardena.net)
Date: Tue Jun 11 2002 - 04:21:41 EEST
On Monday 10 June 2002 07.41, Ivica Bukvic wrote:
> What I think is that this is great since there is less likelihood
> that someone else will be using the same tools I do and hence less
> likely will my music sound like thousands of others :-)
Yeah... :-)
That's pretty much the reason why there are so many audio/MIDI
projects, but so few "mature" applications. We tend to hack totally
incomprehensible stuff that's *just* like we want it. It does what we
need, but most others don't even understand enough of it to care to
see if they could reuse the code, let alone contribute.
My idea is that a common approach to "integration" (high and low
level plugin APIs and the like) can help making more code more
reusable, and perhaps more importantly, easier to understand.
If you rip some DSP code out of an application (if you manage to
figure out that there is code you might have use for in that
application in the first place!), you may have to spend some time
even understanding fundamental things like input/output data formats
and how the code is supposed to be executed. ("Streaming style" or
"callback/buffer style".)
If you find a plugin, you can jump right at the interesting code -
or just use the plugin as is, which could in fact even be done by a
user.
The problem is to come up with APIs that are simple enough, yet
flexible enough to allow common blocks of serious functionality (not
just low level DSP algorithms) to be "canned" and reused.
LADSPA covers one area, and JACK covers another, but there are still
way too many things that just don't fit in LADSPA. Meanwhile, JACK
doesn't provide well defined high level protocols for higher level
interaction between applications.
//David
.- M A I A -------------------------------------------------.
| Multimedia Application Integration Architecture |
| A Free/Open Source Plugin API for Professional Multimedia |
`---------------------------> http://www.linuxdj.com/maia/ -'
.- David Olofson -------------------------------------------.
| Audio Hacker - Open Source Advocate - Singer - Songwriter |
`-------------------------------------> http://olofson.net -'
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