[linux-audio-dev] Blockless processing

Steve Harris S.W.Harris at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Fri Dec 13 05:41:00 UTC 2002


On Fri, Dec 13, 2002 at 03:21:21AM +0100, Tim Goetze wrote:
> Steve Harris wrote:
> 
> >http://plugin.org.uk/blockless/
> 
> it's a nice little hack. the .g files don't look that messy
> to me, whatever hacks may be hiding in your .pl -- which is
> always a mess to my eyes.

Yep, perl is horrible. Unfortunatly I've not learned python and ecmascript
(better than either IMHO) isn't commony availble standalone, so perl is
the the fastest devel language I know.

If I was going to do it for real I would reimplement it in C + lex & yacc.

The .g files are just the simplest thing to transform into C, so they
have some odd syntax.

> >I went as far as defining a biquad filter in the graph format
> >(http://plugin.org.uk/blockless/blockless/modules/biquad.g), but it
> >dosen't quite work because the execution order is more or less random.
> 
> definitely sounds broken, yes. that garbled execution order 
> should be fixed. 

It would be trivial to fix, but I dont see the point, as it stands its not
useful anyway. Its also probably buggy as hell, the perl just handles the
minimum for what I wanted to test.

Its just proof of concept. You /could/ build a system like this if you
wanted to, someone may want to do it for real at some point. If so I'l
gladly lend a hand, but what it needs most is GUI skills and I just dont
have those.

> i think the biquad is so common it's ok to have a .c fragment
> for the operator instead of coding it in your .g language. a
> generic iir generator? you can do it with some more .pl i guess.

Yeah, absolutly, its just the most complex basic that came to mind, I
wanted to check if it could handle loads of modules far down the graph and
still produce a decent binary.

> if you can define sub-graphs (maybe in the same file), with a 
> little focus you should be able to create more complex networks, 
> too.

You can define subgraphs, but not in the same file. It wouldn't be too
hard, but what it would really need is a graphical editor.

It would also be pretty easy to make it produce LADSPA plugins instead of
executables. 

- Steve



More information about the Linux-audio-dev mailing list