[linux-audio-dev] mux concept paper

[mimo]

Walco wrote:
> Hi Mimo,
> 
>> PS.: the paper is here http://mimo.gn.apc.org/mux/
> 
> 
> First of all: nice initiative. But...
> 
> ...why create a new modular audio framework, if you could
> improve, harden and extend an existing one? Think of all that hairy GUI
> code that you don't have to write and debug...

Well and yes. I agree and principle and looked at existing ones but 
seriously didnt like them. beast was mentioned, it's gtk and I cant get 
my head around gtk. Also, it's very heavy on the machines I have tried.
The other thing is, you look at existing code, often undocumented one. 
So you end up spending more time trying to find out what someone else 
was thinking while he did this... and from my experience, often when you 
finish a program, it's best to sit down and rewrite it from scratch.

But I'm open for suggestions, so if anyone knows of an active project 
that I might contribute to let me know

> 
> Another thing: I don't agree with the assessment in your paper that jack
> is heavy-weight -  and I think jack is much more natural fit to your
> application as jackd has xrun detection, already provides means to set a
> lower samplerate and increase period size if your system can't put up
> with the load. IMHO jack is the way to go if your target platform is
> only Linux (or OSX & BSD), otherwise the cross-platform PortAudio may be
> more appropriate.

I know it was a bit provocative to write that. Also, jack is under 
development and I should probably wait for an official release before 
complaining. But my experiences with jack are negative. First time I 
started looking at it I had huge expectations after all that I had read. 
   First problems, after a couple of second of running without any 
actual processing going on, strange noise artefacts kind of getting 
worse. I had a look at source code and realise that it bases its time 
calculation on cpu MHz in /proc/cpuinfo. I dont know about your machine, 
but on my machine(s) a) this is a float and b) it's slightly different 
every time I boot the machine.
The other thing I dont understand about jack is the whole graph 
business. E.g. I look at the artsd in kde and plugin an effect and this 
is seamless, no stopping of audio. In jack, it says "recalculating 
graph" and get a cup of coffee :)

Ok, enough ranting... sorry didnt want to discuss jack really.

> 
> Cheers,
> Walco

mimo

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