[linux-audio-dev] music engine

[Patrick Stinson]

I'm running OS X, and would like to keep my compile-time dependencies
down. Is it possible to get gdam-server running w/o gtk+? libxml is
not too bad, but gtk+ requires quite a bit of stuff.

cheers...

On 4/6/06, Lance Blisters <geoff at riyal.ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 04:14:32AM -0800, Patrick Stinson wrote:
> > I've been looking for a high-performance music engine. It must have an
> > asynchronous control (socket, pipe?) mechanism to seperate the
> > application from the audio thread.
>
> Everytime this comes up, i hesitantly recommend GDAM.  Its an 8 year old
> C and glib project, a server/client music engine with various music interfaces
> on top.  Its core goal was DJ mixing, back when there were few software
> dj apps available.  The design for this was not at all "mimic a turntable
> or cd deck's interface" but rather "digital music files, each with one
> or more areas with regular rhythm, combined and symchronized in
> different ways".  So there are server-side, sample-accurate synch functions
> based on defining tempo-and-downbeat for two tracks and commanding one
> to beatmatch to the other.  It will even walk the audio tree and take
> filters which change tempo, resample, or add latency into account.  It
> is truly sample accurate, you can play two copies of a song, invert one,
> beatmatch, and get silence.
>
> GDAM also has seamless queueing of upcoming tracks, numerous builtin
> effects and LADSPA and JACK support.  You could implement the GDAM
> protocol yourself in any language, or program against the "client"
> library which handles the protocol, or program against the "model"
> library where a number of higher level client-side concepts (turntables,
> sequencers etc) are implemented.  Also a GTK-based GUI library is
> available with pixmap-based widgets.
>
> Why the hesitance?  I can't promise any time at all to explain or help.
> Development of GDAM has been ongoing but i haven't made a release in
> years, and the documentation is quite old, and doesn't cover developer
> topics.
>
> GDAM server audio engine really should be able to handle nearly anything
> you can dream up, its just a matter of all the organization and interface
> work.  I was close to doing a live-alike myself (and have a half-finished
> attempt at a matrix-style loop mixing skin in CVS).  If you search for GDAM
> or ableton in the list archives you'll find some other responses with
> more details.
>
> http://gdam.ffem.org/
>
>   -geoff
>


--
Patrick Kidd Stinson
http://www.patrickkidd.com/
http://pkaudio.sourceforge.net/
http://pksampler.sourceforge.net/