[linux-audio-dev] Channels and best practice

[Paul Davis]

On Tue, 2005-11-15 at 11:58 +0000, James McDermott wrote:
> > What are your thoughts? What is best practice on multichannel audio, or
> > is it always application-specific?
> 
> According to my experience and understanding:
> 
> -non-interleaved (multiple channels in separate arrays) is a bit
> easier to code, but
> -interleaved could give better performance (because the data you need
> "now" is all close together in memory).
> -libsndfile uses interleaved.
> -plugins (DSSI, LADSPA) use separate arrays.

it depends whether playback + recording is the only goal, or editing is
in the potential workflow. editing interleaved data, especially if there
are unrelated signals in different channels that will be treated
differently, is really, really hard. if all you do is playback and
record, interleaved is marginally more efficient.