>I'm not a JACK developer so my opinion may not really count here, but >I really think it would be a bad decision to criplle support for all >hardware that is not able to provide constant size power of two >(frames) periods.
we don't care about non-power-of-two periods, i think. however, i do consider periods defined in units of times and not frames to be broken hardware design. it forces inefficiencies into the software that are totally unnecessary. >And it surely wouldn't be bad for clients not to rely a a particular size >callback. I don't know how CoreAudio handles this. I'm sure EASI did >not have constant size callbacks and VST does not either IIRC. (ASIO >probably does, but ASIO also forces double buffering (I think)...). until recently, JACK provided support for variable numbers of frames in the process() callback. it was removed because no developer was in support of it, and because JACK itself had no use for it. i am quite open to re-examining the issue. however, i don't want inefficient software designs to be forced on us by the stupid use of USB to handle audio. i've had enough of bad hardware designs messing up software, and it won't happen here. if it can be done sensibly, we can do it. --p