[linux-audio-dev] Plugin APIs (again)

[Steve Harris]

On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 05:31:41PM +0100, David Olofson wrote:
> So, what do you do if you don't *have* the source signal you want in 
> audio format? Hack the plugin? (Yeah, ordinary users will love 
> that...)

Well ordinary users dont want audio rate controle either... until sfotware
companies tell them they do ;)
 
> > Well, when people start writing audio rate DSP software that isn't
> > full of hacky optimisation and aproximations the audio rate stuff
> > will be much slower than the control rate stuff ;)
> 
> So, *that's* how desktop applications got as insanely slow as they 
> are these days... :-)

Sure. And so good.
 
> "If I don't need to optimize this, I don't need to optimize that..."

Hmmm. well there are optimisations that jsut make things faster and there
are optimisations that make things faster and worse. Events are sometimes
the later.
 
> Well, there's a practical problem with off-line stuff as well; 
> tweaking until you get the perfect sound takes ages... *hehe*

Oh, yeah. RT editing and massive polyphony makes this stuff so much more
fun. Which is why I'm ecouraging events here :)
 
> Until we can do away with blocks, we probably can't do away with 
> events either. Those sort of belong in the same order of magnitude of 
> work vs overhead.

Yup. Agreed. Though there are a few sitaution where blocks+cont. control
is worthwhile. Just not in generic instrument APIs.

Obviously I'd rather have blockless.

- Steve