[linux-audio-dev] Found out what was wrong with my LADSPA manager programmer

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

On 17 Apr 2003 22:44:09 -0400
Nick Tsocanos <nicktsocanos at charter.net> wrote:

> Erik, when it did that, I thought I needed an excorcist. 

Thats not uncommon :-)

> You really had
> to hear the sounds it was making, and the way it was acting was just
> insane. I had a similar problem with Windows once like this, I got NANs
> into all my audio data by accident, but Windows just froze up. At least
> on Linux it is possible (but painful) to get the application to
> eventually close.
> 
> I can't imagine that such a simple NAN could bring your computer to it's
> knees!

Bascially, the FPU is optimised for handling regular floating point numbers.
Whenever it has to do an operation involving NANs it slows down considerably.


> Now if I only new what a NAN was other than it is not a number.
> 
> I am going to make an album NAN is not a number, and I will put NANs
> into all my controls and audio, and sample them, and then the world can
> be horrified by the sounds of a computer program that is dying.

Thats completely valid. I have created some really interesting samples as
the output of buggy DSP algorithms or faulty file format decoders. I 
encourage you to keep stuff like this :-).

Erik
-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo  nospam at mega-nerd.com (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, 
of course, in a state of sin."  --  John Von Neumann (1951)