On Monday 09 December 2002 16.57, Steve Harris wrote: > On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 03:49:55PM +0100, David Olofson wrote: > > > Converting between continuous control and event control is not > > > reliable, and kinda removes the point of cont. control. > > > > Yes, but without converters, you can't do things like applying > > audio effects on controls... > > Right, so I think its better to just ignore it. Where people > want/need it they will just use audio ports (like in LADSPA).
So, what do you do if you don't *have* the source signal you want in audio format? Hack the plugin? (Yeah, ordinary users will love that...) > > Well, yeah - and if you can run hundreds of *those*, it probably > > doesn't matter that every single synth voice spends more CPU time > > processing control data than audio. :-) > > Well, when people start writing audio rate DSP software that isn't > full of hacky optimisation and aproximations the audio rate stuff > will be much slower than the control rate stuff ;) So, *that's* how desktop applications got as insanely slow as they are these days... :-) "If I don't need to optimize this, I don't need to optimize that..." > > Yes - but I'd rather not wait ten years before I can actually > > *use* my software! :-) > > I use audio rate control software now, it just limits the amount of > synthesis you can do on a modern machine from ludicrous to just > excessive > :) Well, that sounds ok. :-) > > In fact, I've already waited *more* than ten years already for > > PCs to become at all usable for serious audio synthesis and > > recording. Now they are, but since I didn't have Linux/lowlatency > > some years ago, I never got around to write any hopelessly > > inefficient software that would have been just fine today. ;-) > > Really? I wrote some offline sysntesis software years ago (amiga > and sun4) that would run realtime now. Though theres no point > porting it, it didn't sound very good :) Thats more down to my lack > of ability than anything else. I bet there are people with old > csound scores they can now run realtime. Well, there's a practical problem with off-line stuff as well; tweaking until you get the perfect sound takes ages... *hehe* BTW, I did write some Amiga software back then - but that actually ran in real time, and obviously couldn't sound all that great. (And though the 25 MHz A3000 helped a lot, it was still very far from even the lowest end synths. Either voices or quality; not both.) > > > There are some hardware synths in existence today that use > > > cont. control and blockless processing. The improvement in > > > sound quality is noticable. > > > > Do they use that for *everything* (like all parameters, switches > > etc), or just where it actually matters? > > The one I know most about has some controls that run at a reduced > rate (1/4). But everything is a stream, no events and no blocks. Well, we'll need a *few* more registers to do this on workstations, I think...! :-) Until we can do away with blocks, we probably can't do away with events either. Those sort of belong in the same order of magnitude of work vs overhead. //David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate .- 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 -' .- M A I A -------------------------------------------------. | The Multimedia Application Integration Architecture | `----------------------------> http://www.linuxdj.com/maia -' --- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---
