Re: [Linuxsampler-devel] Anything going on?

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

On Thursday 12 December 2002 14.17, Benno Senoner wrote:
> Antii, no problem regarding your skills in a good product, the GUI
> is as important as the engine thus your help will be very precious.
>
> PS: I'm CCing David Olofson which has revived Audiality (a
> sampler/synth engine that ranges from games to building high
> quality soft synths/samplers ... see his posts on LAD.
>
> I hope David joins our mailing list since he is very knowledgable
> when it comes to efficient real time code, time stamping of events
> etc. At time David and I have had really cool (private) discussions
> about event systems, sample accurate time stamps for plugins /
> engines etc, David, I see you have now a bit more time to dedicate
> to linux audio things.

Well, yes - I've put Kobo Deluxe, glSDL and that on hold for now, and=20
most of the time has been spent on Audiality lately. (Except for the=20
last few days, which I've spent mostly discussing and working on XAP;=20
our new instrument plugin API.)

Oh, Audiality and XAP both have (rudimentary, but still) pages on my=20
site:
=09http://olofson.net=09(try the naigation bar :-)


> Do you intend to join our quest to provide
> this highly universal sampler engine that could be used for many
> apps ranging from games to high quality midi software sound modules
> ?
> I mean, from your web page it seems that both audiatily and
> linuxsampler  want to achieve similar goals. You mentioned the
> willing of implement disk streaming too, so why not unite the two
> things ? In my opinion it would make sense.

I don't know yet. It would obviously seem like we have *lots* of=20
common goals, and also more than a few design choices in common.

There are basically three things we need to agree on:

=09* Language
=09=09I strongly prefer C, mostly for portability reasons,
=09=09but also since I don't think the complexity of the
=09=09engine motivates the use of C++. (And mind you; I
=09=09have a scripting engine in there! ;-)

=09* Scalability
=09=09Audiality runs rather well on very low end PCs. Due
=09=09to the extremely space efficient script based sounds,
=09=09it's possibly to fit rather high quality music in
=09=09a few kB - on par with IXS. These are things I would
=09=09like to maintain and explore further. (Although they
=09=09may not be my top priorities right now.)

=09* License
=09=09LGPL is the only license that makes sense for
=09=09Audiality. (Which means that I'll have to "clean"
=09=09the code if I can't get in touch with Masanao Izumo.)
=09=09The GPL is too restrictive, since it does not allow
=09=09the use of Audiality as the audio/music engine in
=09=09proprietary games and multimedia productions.


> I think is is a good thing if you people come up with
> solutions/proposals for implementing a sampler engine, but in the
> long run it would be wise to join our forces and work on highly
> reusable modular components like samplelibrary reading libs, sample
> rendering engines, patch editors etc.

Yes indeed. If XAP turns out right, there's a good chance of=20
Audiality being split up into a "plugin kit", since it's already=20
working in similar ways to a XAP plugin net internally. (In fact, the=20
event system in my XAP proposal is just a slightly generalized=20
version of the Audiality event system - which in turn, was derived=20
from the MAIA code.)

I think we might have a rather nice pilot project for XAP here. This=20
design needs serious review and testing before finalizing, and using=20
it to modularize Audiality as well as a framework for Linuxsampler=20
should probably force most issues to surface. These two projects=20
include off-line rendering, direct-from-disk playback, advanced real=20
time control (soon scripting in Audiality) and real time processing.=20
Add a sequencer with some editing operations, we have a "test suite"=20
the covers most plugin API features we can think of - as well as a=20
pretty cool toolkit! :-)


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

=2E- 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 -'
=2E- M A I A -------------------------------------------------.
|    The Multimedia Application Integration Architecture    |
`----------------------------> http://www.linuxdj.com/maia -'
   --- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---