On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 10:50:26AM +0200, Vincent Touquet wrote: Agreed. There are a number of ways to solve this, but sadly they all require a significant ammount of effort, and there are always some importnat things to be done... A laso kinda like the UI melange effect you get on VST systems, though some of hte UIs are truely awful. Well, theres the chameleon (sp?), but that isn;t a card, so wont lett you accelerate just inner loops. It would be a nice thing but its hard for DSP card manufacturers to compete with CPU+mothboard guys in the price/performance stakes, because the volume is so low. I keep seeing hints that th next generation of motherboards might include some sort of DSP capability, and theres always graphics cards, which have pretty meaty DSP capabilities. + suspend to ram for a standby mode. Linux recoveres from S2R very quickly. - Steve

I just have to say that the Chameleon is a rack-hackers tool of choice and if any of you audio/Linux guys haven't had a chance to check it out yet, you must definitely do so. It's so nice to have a Chameleon in a rack of gear, and suddenly find a need for '808' style drums - fine, load 'em up in the Chameleon and forget about the rack. Oh wait, no we don't need drums, we need another Delay for the Rack XL percussion - no problems, Chameleon will do that too. Got a guitarist coming over, give him access to the Chameleon for virtual amp simulation. The list, slowly but surely, of Chameleon applications goes on and on... Chameleon is a 'plugins' mentality with hardware levels of quality expectations, and in that capacity it works very, very well. I can *always* make a PC running plugins crash - I have never, ever crashed the Chameleon, even with my coding efforts. The Chameleon in my rack fits in just as an important role as the Virus Rack XL in the same rack, in my opinion... if you haven't checked it out, and you're an 'audio apps' hacker type of Linux individual with an interest in DSP, you'll find a lot to like about the Chameleon development system. I know I like mine, anyway! A lot! (Well, hey, I also like my Access DSP development hardware too, but that's a different story and not for this forum...) I only wish there were better Linux (or OSX) development tools for the Chameleon - I despise having to have a Windows partition around just for Chameleon hacking. Boo!! -- ; Jay Vaughan r&d>>music:technology:synthesizers - www.access-music.de/

I think that the low-latency work being done in the kernel, the latest LADSPA work, and Jack work by Paul D, pretty much levels the playing field technology-wise. Same with driver design, although OSX user-space driver support is pretty bitchin' when it comes to doing things like USB i/o and such. (I'm sure there's something similar for Linux, though...) I will say this: it is possible to target both OSX and Linux platforms at the *same* time when doing audio app development as long as you're not doing any fancy OSX-specific GUI stuff. The API's for audio processing are compatible enough to where a decently organized source-code project could use CoreMIDI on OSX, or MidiShare under Linux (by way of example), and still have a lot of common code between them. Just look at Audacity for an example. The ability to deliver both Linux and OSX versions of an audio app should not be underestimated, also... Interestingly enough, I think both OSX and Linux are about at neck and neck in the apps department. The ability to port Carbon apps gives OSX an edge, but the fact is all the pieces are in place now in Linux for some seriously productive tools to be written. Same as OSX. If Paul Davis and crew can build Ardour out of the API's they've forged for Linux, then so too can Digi build a Pro Tools for Linux... not that they ever would, but the fact is: Linux can do it now. I don't know what you're talking about. It is very easy to write cross-platform GUI widgets which can be used in both Linux and OSX ... whats hard is implementing GUI widgets which work within the relative frameworks imposed by both environments if you stick to the "Developer Way in OSX", but what I'm finding is that its possible to maintain complete API compatability between Linux and OSX and still write powerful audio processing apps that work well in both environments. One thing to be careful is the blindness that can occur when searching for GUI toolkits - the most obvious ways of doing it cross-platform will be hidden from you in your search for "complete GUI toolkit"... any "complete" GUI toolkit will probably end up enforcing its own architecture on you, and that's just the wrong way to look at it if you want to maintain Linux/OSX compatability. Consistency in a user interface is one thing. A user interface which works very well and which becomes popular overnight is another thing entirely. Whenever I think about GUI toolkits, I always try to learn the lessons which Kai's Power Tools taught us in the early 90's. Consistency in a GUI is no substitute for a well done task-designed GUI. Linux is ideal for this sort of thing. They are out there. You can find DSP cards for Linux, quite easily, if you do a bit of searching. There's an Extended CSound DSP adapter which works quite well with Linux. In summary, from a professional audio developers perspective, I'd say that Linux is nearing readiness for prime time, and all it will take is one or two pretty heavy apps to be released for folks to realize this ... I watch Ardour with baited breath, anyway! -- ; Jay Vaughan r&d>>music:technology:synthesizers - www.access-music.de/

http://www.transtech-dsp.com/news/ts-p36.htm http://www.sgmltools.org/HOWTO/Parallel-Processing-HOWTO/t11613.html I can't for the life of me find the 'mini-Synth' link around, but I had it just last week. Basically, its a collection (like a webwring) of users who have put together 'mini-synths' based off the Analog Devices SHARC eval boards, and they have Linux tools. I'll see if I can find the URL again on Tuesday at work, it was pretty cool. Everyone had their own tweaked-out synth, but still run the same Linux software... What have you done so far? In terms of driver subsystem, what's wrong with just /dev/dsp00, /dev/dsp01, etc? -- ; Jay Vaughan r&d>>music:technology:synthesizers - www.access-music.de/

I heard about this announcement as a rumoure but haven't seen anything 'official' on it. However if the mighty Paul Davis has heard it too, then there must be some weight in it. Do you have any details about it handy Paul? It might be good for me to show such stuff to the decision-makers here at Access ... -- ; Jay Vaughan r&d>>music:technology:synthesizers - www.access-music.de/

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Paul Davis wrote: yamaha invested in an embedded linux company, but i can't find anything about yamaha saying anything like that... http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS4320911983.html -Dan -- [-] Omae no subete no kichi wa ore no mono da. [-]