On Wednesday 13 February 2002 17.26, Joachim Backhaus wrote: [...] > I see no reason that Windows and DOS exist!
Well, you know, some people just *got* to make money by charging for taking people's right away... ;-) > > >Wouldn't it be much more efficient to bundle > > >the power to one superb API? > > > > > >E.g. I have found LADSPA, MAIA and OX_API. > > > > MAIA does not exist. > > What is this: http://www.linuxdj.com/mucos/ ? It's what ended up on-line when I was trying design a plugin API. In it's current form, tt's useless for any practical purposes, and I haven't touched it for several months. I decided I don't have the time and motivation required to get an API that complex right, without actually *using* it in a real project of my own - so I put MAIA on hold, and started thinking about something sensible to do, where it could fit in. Meanwhile, I happened to browse the KDE menues of a Mandrake system, and found the old X game XKobo by Akira Higuchi - and was instantly hooked! It's a 2D shooter that's every bit as playable, addictive and durable as the best of the classics - and this one's GPLed. :-) In a few days, I had it using SDL (http://libsdl.org) for graphics (primarily to get fullscreen modes and remove the X dependency), and a few days later, the game + Masanao Izumo's sound engine was running on Linux and Win32. (That's the only platforms I test on myself.) The port was initially called "SKobo", but eventually, the name was changed to "Kobo Deluxe". Since then, I've added loads of features and tweaks, such as OpenGL rendering and radar "follow mode" scrolling. I've received hints and patches to make the game build and run on Mac OS X, FreeBSD and various Solaris variants (x86 and SPARC). The latest versions can be found at: http://olofson.net/skobo Latest snapshots at: http://olofson.net/download "So what!?!" Well, hacking away on the audio engine of that game, the circle was inevitably beginning to close - and Masanao Izumo's original 8 kHz sound effect player was turning into something more like a full-blown software synthesizer. Although it's primarily designed to scale from very low end machines and up, running in parallel with a game, the latest versions do include a channel/bus mixing architecture, insert effect plugins, a scriptable "waveform construction API", a rudimentary MIDI implementation and some other fun stuff. (Sorry, no interesting stuff done with the Kobo Deluxe audio engine as of the current versions - although you could activate the MIDI input code at configure time if you want to play around with it. The MIDI file reader/player is "in place" and will be used in a version released Real Soon Now. :-) The plan is that I'll eventually return to MAIA - or rather, keep the useful parts and start over. Some design ideas from the "Kobo Deluxe Audio Engine" (like the state machine interface for plugin open/init/prepare/start etc) will most probably be dragged in. The focus will *probably* shift from MAIA as a stand-alone plugin API towards MAIA as an "event toolkit" that could be used in conjunction with other APIs or frameworks, such as JACK. Remains to see if that still makes sense when I get there. //David .- M A I A -------------------------------------------------. | Multimedia Application Integration Architecture | | A Free/Open Source Plugin API for Professional Multimedia | `----------------------> http://www.linuxaudiodev.com/maia -' .- David Olofson -------------------------------------------. | Audio Hacker - Open Source Advocate - Singer - Songwriter | `-------------------------------------> http://olofson.net -'
