I sent a long, extremely rambling email about this to the unfortunate Erik
Steffl at 2:30am last night. I think I was mostly asleep by then. To
summarise, yep, I agree that designing some kind of flexible
multimedia/audio bus is a very worthwhile enterprise with (some) chance of
success - and this needs to happen, preferably soon. This issue can be
separated fairly cleanly from LADSPA (which is about sharing sound
processing algorithms rather than sharing streamed data). Separation gives
encapsulation, simplicity, robustness, reusability etc. I cannot believe I
managed to turn that into so many pages of drivel... Apologies Erik!
Has anyone actually done this before? I built a system three or four years
ago for live interactive music - this used shm & msg to communicate between
dozens of processes but was rather hacky and non-generic. I've a spec for
the MNHub lying around somewhere - this is based on sockets/pipes and is
fairly generic, but I've not actually coded it or worked with it, so I'm
not sure where the bottle-necks, interface mangling etc actually happen. I
suspect we also want to consult folk who know about ATM networking as this
deals with important and difficult quality of service issues. Is there
another Linux list we could borrow people from?
-- Richard
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 8:25 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [linux-audio-dev] audio application mixing/routing arch
Hi. Sorry for these high level questions; if there's a better place to
ask these, please let me know.
It appears that LADSPA is a single process architecture for routing audio
(or whatever) streams in a transparent manner. Are there plans for a
generalized interprocess architecture (aRts, alsa, mucos?) that will allow
for instance 4 processes:
1. Software HD recorder with 8 tracks of output
2. Software Sampler with 8 tracks of output
3. Software Synth with 8 tracks of output
- into -
4. 24 channel Software Mixer with lots of plugins :)
The ability to connect app->plugin and app->app would be very flexible and
very cool. Anyone know how this is done in the mac/windows world?
Mike
