[linux-audio-user] Re: [linux-audio-dev] music engine

[Kjetil Svalastog Matheussen]

Paul Davis:
>> As an interface designer, the first thing I look for on an engine's
>> project site is some sort of asynchronous API - I should never concern
>> myself with anything outside referencing the api from my app's one
>> windowing thread. FMOD, gstreamer, and my dead pkaudio project do this
>> very well. I don't ever want to worry about what thread it happens in,
>> what threads it will affect, or what the performance effects of
>> *making* the call will be (as opposed to residual effects).
>
>although i agree that this is the right design for many classes of
>application design, i would like to see how you propose to tackle
>metering and waveform display (the two most difficult examples).
>ardour would be relatively easy to separate into interface+engine
>processes (as opposed to just a lib/lib-client separation) if it were
>not for these issues. moving waveform and metering data back and forth
>between two processes via a wire protocol is very expensive and
>inefficient.

How about creating the gfx waveform data on the engine and then just
send a pointer to the gfx process, which displays the data using the 
MIT-SHM X extension?

PS. Please don't let this inspire you to reimplement Ardour. :-)