[gst-devel] Re: Fwd: Re: [linux-audio-dev] MAIA status

[David O. <da...@ga...>]

On Wednesday 17 January 2001 08:17, David Olofson wrote:
[...]
> MAIA - as opposed to VST 2.0, which has a similar event system,
> which is strapped onto an older, function call based API -
> implements sample accurate timing from the ground up; every plugin
> has an outer event decoding loop around the DSP loop (*), and
> breaks the inner loop to process every event before the exact
> sample as indicated by the event timestamp. This is normally done
> entirely within the outer loop of the plugin - no function calls;
> just raw, optimized inline code.
>
> (*) Except for plugins that really don't want or can't respond with
>     sample accuracy - for those, you just process all events for
>     the current buffer before entering the DSP loop. That's all -
>     no special cases at run time, host support or anything.

Oh, not entirely true, actually; such a plugin probably should tell=20
the host that it's not going to care much about timestamps, just in=20
case the user wonders why it appears to have so sloppy timing. :-)

There are other issues as well, but those are related to Protocols=20
and protocol tricks that perhaps are too weird to ever find a real=20
use. However, even if some of these things do get into the API, the=20
timestamps are still there (even if the host may chose not to=20
guarantee their order if the plugin claims that it doesn't care),=20
it's still possible to handle in the event decoding phase.


//David

=2E- M A I A -------------------------------------------------.
|      Multimedia Application Integration Architecture      |
| A Free/Open Source Plugin API for Professional Multimedia |
`----------------------> http://www.linuxaudiodev.com/maia -'
=2E- David Olofson -------------------------------------------.
| Audio Hacker - Open Source Advocate - Singer - Songwriter |
`--------------------------------------> da...@li... -'