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

Frank Barknecht fbar at footils.org
Sun Apr 9 06:17:57 EDT 2006


Hallo,
Lee Revell hat gesagt: // Lee Revell wrote:

> On Sat, 2006-04-08 at 16:41 +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> > Make that "can cause xruns": Pd is used live on stage more than any
> > other single Linux Audio Software, you just need to avoid doing some
> > rather exotic things, and even then there are workarounds (like
> > running two instances of Pd: one gui, one nogui.)
> 
> Do you know if there's any plan to fix it?

Since one or two versions Pd "throttles" the amount of data sent from
the main engine to the GUI, and there's also a branch/fork of Pd
called DesireData (still not usable) that tries a more general
approach to decouple the GUI from the main engine. In my experience
the GUI interrupting audio is not a real problem in practice, except
maybe in some rather special use cases - but I tend to play Pd "blind"
when performing: I cannot and don't want to watch 128 VU meters on
stage anyway.

Because at its heart Pd is a programming language some of the
responsibility to build a working instead of a broken GUI is with the
user of Pd. With Ardour, you could blame Paul if you get lots of
xruns, but with Pd it may be your own fault.

Pd now is in its tenth year of existence (not counting its
predecessors like Max or Patcher) and in several places it doesn't
follow what today is viewed as good practice, and there sure is room
for improvement. However this didn't and doesn't harm Pd's usefulness
to hundreds of users so much as to make them stop working with Pd.
(It does stop some, though.)

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                 _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__



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