On 4/7/06, Paul Davis <paul@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 14:23 -0800, Patrick Stinson wrote:
> > As an added note to my previous comments, I really like the app
> > interface that mpd uses. Writing ascii events using some spec or
> > another to a file descriptor (socket in mpd's case) seems to be a
> > terrific way to communicated with apps and libs. I run the svn
> > pksampler like this:
> >
> > pksampler | pkaudiod
> >
> > I could just as easily have either use a socket or some other pipe,
> > and this is easy to debug, script, profile, etc. On the client and
> > server sides, I wrap my 10-minute rpc into an interface with generic
> > calls. Everything having to do with input (MIDI, OSC, whatever)
> > happens in the app code. The interface functions resemble those of
> > FMODEx's interface; add sample, connect to channel, set sample attrs,
> > etc.
> >
> > As an interface designer, the first thing I look for on an engine's
> > project site is some sort of asynchronous API - I should never concern
> > myself with anything outside referencing the api from my app's one
> > windowing thread. FMOD, gstreamer, and my dead pkaudio project do this
> > very well. I don't ever want to worry about what thread it happens in,
> > what threads it will affect, or what the performance effects of
> > *making* the call will be (as opposed to residual effects).
>
> although i agree that this is the right design for many classes of
> application design, i would like to see how you propose to tackle
> metering and waveform display (the two most difficult examples).
> ardour would be relatively easy to separate into interface+engine
> processes (as opposed to just a lib/lib-client separation) if it were
> not for these issues. moving waveform and metering data back and forth
> between two processes via a wire protocol is very expensive and
> inefficient.
>
> --p
>
>
>
Yes, that's always the first hangup, isn't it! Everyone want's those
cool r,p,d meters, and they want them to be *fast*, don't they? I am
doing my best to keep my app out of the realm of needing that sort of
shared data to keep the app/engine as simple as possible. Your comment
is correct, and I can only agree that there is a fine line between
needing cool levels and not.
-- Patrick Kidd Stinson http://www.patrickkidd.com/ http://pkaudio.sourceforge.net/ http://pksampler.sourceforge.net/Received on Sat Apr 8 12:15:08 2006
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