On Wed, 03 Jul 2002 18:45:33 -0700
"robbins jacob" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I am writing a sequencer application for performance use, sort of like a 
> tracker but with a more flexible pattern structure. 

An the Paul Davis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> the fashion in the last few years has been specifically to *not* put
> PCM files in memory, but to stream them from disk (see
> gigasampler). by putting them in memory, you limit the size of the
> samples you can use quite noticeably. even a machine with 2GB of
> physical RAM wouldn't be particularly useful with contemporary grand
> piano samples.

If you head in that direction I encourage you to look at libsndfile:

     http://www.zip.com.au/~erikd/libsndfile/

which is simply a library for doing audio file I/O from/to disk. Using
libsndfile it should be relatively easy to cache whatever you *must* 
have in memory and retrieve the rest from disk as you need it.

I have released release candidate 2 of version 1.0.0 and there should
be very few very minor changes between now and the final release. 

One of the things I have been doing is benchmarking all file I/O and 
fixing any problems found. The final release will do faster I/O than 
all previous releases for all file formats. This is much more than any 
of the competition does as I am not aware of any benchmarking being 
done on those projects.

By using libsndfile, you'd be joining some of the following luminaries:

Conrad Parker (author of sweep) says:
   "..... to use libsndfile, which is easier than falling off a teflon 
    log after drinking a bottle of vodka"

Paul Davis (Ardour and more) says:
   "i'm a huge fan of libsndfile (its so much better than the SGI 
   inspired API that does the same thing)."

Cheers,
Erik
-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
  Erik de Castro Lopo  [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Yes it's valid)
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
Moore's Law: hardware speed doubles every 18 months
Gates' Law: software speed halves every 18 months 

Reply via email to