On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 09:34 +0000, Steve Harris wrote:
You can use the creative dsp chips, but thye dont have
enough horsepower
to run a reverb. Someone was looking into support for the creamware cards,
but I dont know how far they got.
It would be nice to have support for some of the PCI DSP cards, even with
closed source plugins, but I dont know how complicateed they are, and I
suspect extracting the plugins from the mac/win drivers would be tricky.
Actually the Creative/EMU stuff might work well. After all EAX is just
a userspace API to access the hardware reverb on the emu10k1/2 chips,
and these were designed to do 3D audio effects (a lot of which is
reverb) for Windows games. It's probably not for you if you need
professional studio-quality effects but Windows gamers love the stuff,
and anything that's good enough for a modern video game would certainly
be useful for live performance type applications.
The EAX 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 reverbs have been extracted from the Creative
dlls and the reverse engineered DSP source code is available here (check
out the SDK in the downloads section):
http://www.kxproject.com
There are also hundreds of other effects for the emu10k1 DSP. Most of
them seem to be free software (there is a restriction that you need
Eugene's permission to use the DSP code in a commercial product). The
reverse engineered stuff is covered by the original Creative/EMU
licenses anyway. AFAIK no one has tried to use these reverbs on Linux
yet but there's nothing to stop you. The instruction set is fairly well
known so you can write your own. The DSP loader is not as mature as the
Windows driver but it does work.
http://ld10k1.sf.net
The emu10k2 based chips have a lot more DSP horsepower than emu10k1.
Lee