[linux-audio-dev] Wave Editors

[Conrad Parker]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 02:18:43PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> >Is this really of any use? I never recorded with sweep (I use
> >ecasound), but when I tried to load a 10 minute ogg file into sweep,
> >it refused this because of exhausted memory. I have 256 MB, that
> >should be enough for 10 minutes of sound data. So how good is sweep
> >with longer soundfiles? 
> 
> *if* sweep uses floats or ints to represent audio data in memory (a
> big *if*) then 10 minutes of 48kHz 2 channel audio is about 219MB:
>   
>    mins * secs/min * samples/sec * bytes/sample * channels
> 
>      10 * 60 * 48000 * 4 * 2 = 230400000 / 1048576 = 219

yep (floats)

in fact sweep will even tell you how much memory it's blowing:

http://www.metadecks.org/software/sweep/images/screenshots/tour/new_file.png

> 
> i would consider a much more fundamental problem with sweep (which the
> author has plans to fix at some point) is the assumption that the
> audio data will fit in memory. this just isn't viable for working with
> "music" rather than "audio clips".

yep, you're right about that assumption. This year I kind of had to make a
stable editor for short clips, so I went all out on the GUI and usability
for sweep.

I'm actually more interested personally in editing music than clips, so
this is going to change. I've already got most of the internal code for
that (and a whole lot more), but I'll shut up about that until its done.

what I have found though is that you can do a hell of a lot more in memory
than I'd previously thought possible, now I have to translate as much of
that as possible to a work with disk caching :)

Conrad.