28 Oct
2002
28 Oct
'02
2:47 p.m.
As promised, I'd like to revive the linux audio sampler I was working on
about 2 years ago.
I was forced to take a long pause (almost 2 years) from LAD stuff
because I had to finish my CS degree before the retirement age.
But speaking speaking with various developers on LAD there seems big
interest for a high quality software sampler for Linux, especially one
that can play samples from disk since there are now many huge sample
libraries out that only work with samplers that can stream. (Halion,
GIG).
As some of you probably remember at that time, I wrote some
proof-of-concept code that demonstrate that it is possibile to achieve
sub-5msec latencies while streaming samples from disk under Linux given
a lowlat enabled kernel.
But my (and other's) vision is to write a sampler that is both efficient
and offers flexible modulation and routing plus that it can interact
with jack and other audio/midi sw present in your linux virtual studio
setup.
I was toying with the idea of using some sort of recompilation
techniques where the user can graphically design the sampler's signal
flow (routing, modulation, FXes etc) which in turns get translated into
C code that get loaded as a .so file and executed within the sampler's
main app. This would make up for a very flexible engine while retaining
most of the speed of hard coded ones.
I have set up a site and a mailinglist for the sampler at
http://linuxsampler.sourceforge.net
Without the help of all you LAD geniuses LinuxSampler will not become
the sampler I (and others) have in mind, so if you are interested to
contribute code, ideas, designs or want to give advices because you have
lots of experience with hardware samplers or windows/mac applications,
with the please subscribe to the
linuxsampler-devel mailing list at:
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxsampler-devel
Since LinuxSampler will support JACK from the beginning, I hope that the
jack core members sign up to the mailing list too in order to solve
issues related to jack more quickly.
PS: I suggest to go into planning mode for a while in order to sort out
things a bit and lay out an elegant design concept in order to avoid
the usual spaghetti code projects.
thoughts ?
cheers,
Benno
http://www.linuxaudiodev.org The Home Of Linux Audio Development