[linux-audio-dev] Plans/Roadmaps for 2005?

[David Olofson]

On Friday 07 January 2005 15.40, Florian Schmidt wrote:
> Hi,
>
> i'm writing this email, because i'm interested in what plans the
> different linux audio developers have for the year 2005 Any new
> revolutionary applications planned?

Nothing revolutionary, perhaps, but I'm thinking about hacking some 
sort of hybrid sequencer/code editor for Audiality. Type some script 
code, hit record and play some notes and control data right into the 
source, pop up a graphical envelope editor and adjust the recorded 
data a bit etc... Something like that. I'll just start with a mostly 
text based interactive script editor and feel my way from there, 
while trying to create stuff with it.


> Major changes to some of the 
> existing apps?

Audiality will have the old "scripting engine" replaced with a new 
bytecode VM based one, designed from the ground up for real time 
applications. Almost a complete rewrite, but I'm keeping the name for 
now: EEL; Extensible Embeddable Language.

(Better ideas? I'd like to get Real Time, Deterministic or something 
in there, to indicate that this isn't Yet Another Scripting Language 
With Coffee Break Garbage Collection. DEEL? (Deterministic E.E.L.))

EEL is LGPLed and written in portable C. It's rather similar to Lua in 
some ways; about the same size, the VM is about as fast (though the 
EEL compiler is rather stupid at this point), has a similar set of 
types, dynamic typing, automatic memory management etc - but EEL is 
designed with low latency real time applications in mind from the 
ground up. The syntax is somewhere in between Lua, C and Pascal, I 
guess...

For Audiality, this means true real time scripting, as opposed to 
off-line-only rendering of waveforms + some configurable real time 
objects. The EEL binding will probably take over from the C API as 
the primary low level interface. High level stuff like "play this 
sound now" will be defined by the content author by means of scripts 
that process events from the application.


> Where is help needed?

I'm wrapping the EEL scripting engine up for the first release as we 
speak. (Hunting down the last few bugs that I think are too annoying 
to deserve a life on the other side of my firewall.) Some people 
playing around with it a bit wouldn't hurt! :-)

I'm planning on hacking an SDL binding as one of the first add-on 
projects. That should make the thing a lot more fun to play with. :-D


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

.- Audiality -----------------------------------------------.
|  Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia.  |
| MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... |
`-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -'
   --- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---