9 Dec
2002
9 Dec
'02
12:36 p.m.
On Monday 09 December 2002 16.57, Steve Harris wrote:
So, *that's* how desktop applications got as insanely slow as they
are these days... :-)
"If I don't need to optimize this, I don't need to optimize that..."
Well, that sounds ok. :-)
Well, there's a practical problem with off-line stuff as well;
tweaking until you get the perfect sound takes ages... *hehe*
BTW, I did write some Amiga software back then - but that actually
ran in real time, and obviously couldn't sound all that great. (And
though the 25 MHz A3000 helped a lot, it was still very far from even
the lowest end synths. Either voices or quality; not both.)
The one I know most about has some controls that run at a reduced
rate (1/4). But everything is a stream, no events and no blocks.
Well, we'll need a *few* more registers to do this on workstations, I
think...! :-)
Until we can do away with blocks, we probably can't do away with
events either. Those sort of belong in the same order of magnitude of
work vs overhead.
//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate
.- The Return of Audiality! --------------------------------.
| Free/Open Source Audio Engine for use in Games or Studio. |
| RT and off-line synth. Scripting. Sample accurate timing. |
`---------------------------> http://olofson.net/audiality -'
.- M A I A -------------------------------------------------.
| The Multimedia Application Integration Architecture |
`----------------------------> http://www.linuxdj.com/maia -'
--- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 03:49:55PM +0100, David
Olofson wrote:
Right, so I think its better to just ignore it. Where people
want/need it they will just use audio ports (like in LADSPA).
So, what do you do if you don't *have* the source signal you want in
audio format? Hack the plugin? (Yeah, ordinary users will love
that...)
Converting between continuous control and event control is not
reliable, and kinda removes the point of cont. control.
Yes, but without converters, you can't do things like applying
audio effects on controls... Well, yeah -
and if you can run hundreds of *those*, it probably
doesn't matter that every single synth voice spends more CPU time
processing control data than audio. :-)
Well, when people start writing audio rate DSP software that isn't
full of hacky optimisation and aproximations the audio rate stuff
will be much slower than the control rate stuff ;) Yes - but
I'd rather not wait ten years before I can actually
*use* my software! :-)
I use audio rate control software now, it just limits the amount of
synthesis you can do on a modern machine from ludicrous to just
excessive
:) In fact,
I've already waited *more* than ten years already for
PCs to become at all usable for serious audio synthesis and
recording. Now they are, but since I didn't have Linux/lowlatency
some years ago, I never got around to write any hopelessly
inefficient software that would have been just fine today. ;-)
Really? I wrote some offline sysntesis software years ago (amiga
and sun4) that would run realtime now. Though theres no point
porting it, it didn't sound very good :) Thats more down to my lack
of ability than anything else. I bet there are people with old
csound scores they can now run realtime. There are some hardware synths in existence today that
use
cont. control and blockless processing. The improvement in
sound quality is noticable.
Do they use that for *everything* (like all parameters, switches
etc), or just where it actually matters?