[LAD] Tutorial for programming with JACK

[Joel Roth]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 04:00:22PM -0800, Kris Calabio wrote:

> I want to eventually understand how DAW applications like
> Ardour and Qtractor in particular are written, but the
> source code of those apps are quite intimidating to me at
> the moment.  If there is anything else I can do to aid in
> my learning, that would be great.

Hi Kris,

What you're approaching is a very large subject,
covering many areas of software design.

If you're interested in the signal processing
part, you may look at something like sox or
ecasound. There is no GUI to distract you. :-)

For the user interface part, there are tons of resources on
GUI design. To get familiar with a GUI toolkit you have to
start creating widgets. gtk and Wx are popular at the moment. 

Nama, which I'm most familiar with :-), uses Ecasound
for the audio processing, but otherwise aspires to be
at least as capable as the Big GUI Boys. 

It's written in perl, so you as you begin to penetrate that
syntax, you can see how the data structures are managed so
that Ecasound gets the guidance it needs to DAW.

Some years ago, I discovered how ignorant I was when I tried
to make some sense of Ardour's class hierarchy and its
functions. 

For the uninitiated, C++ sources are probably at least as
hard to browse as perl.

Your approach will depend a lot on the languages and
toolkits you find worth investing to understand.
 
> -Kris

-- 
Joel Roth