[linux-audio-dev] Best road to audio programming happiness?

[Paul Davis]

>For me Jack has been confusing as I'm not sure in what process/thread
>my audio routine runs. Somebody here wrote Jack's interesting thing is

its not your job to know which thread, only that it runs in a
different thread that you do not control, and that you should not block.

>that it can route audio through applications. I don't want that.
>I want that Jack takes my C function (or its compiled object) and
>executes that within the real-time audio engine.

well, it does both, in order to better maximise peace, love and
happiness throughout the world and beyond.

>Even if Jack is used, should one prepare process non-realtime audio
>within your own application. You cannot send background audio
>processings to Jack. Threads in the application are important
>because it is not good that the whole application freezes when
>one opens a big audiofile to editor, for example.

the capture client gives a good pedagogical example of how to handle
stuff in another thread so that you don't block the audio thread. it
might make sense to come up with jack_play at some point, but i've
resisted it because alsaplayer exists already.

>I have not yet seen even moderate explanations or guides on those
>topics. We have discussed about Model-View-Controller (MVC)
>scheme, but nobody seemed to have any practical tool-level
>explanations so that I could easily use MVC in my applications.

MVC is an approach for writing UIs and/or control models. code with no
control path, or a control path that is invisible to the code
(e.g. LADSPA) doesn't really benefit from MVC. MVC also isn't a tool
level approach, its a design method that you mostly have to keep in
your head as you work. i've never seen any tools that enforce or
support an MVC model. 

>I suggest to start with Jack, not with Alsa or OSS.
>It took me an hour to write a Theremin synth, sort of.
>Very easy. (GUI was built with GTK+.)

that's great to hear.

--p