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Date: Fri, 15 May 1998 11:07:30 +0100
From: "P.J.Leonard" <P.J.Leonard@bath.ac.uk>
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To: alsa-devel@jcu.cz
Subject: Re: misc alsa things
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Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 14 May 1998, Alan Robinson wrote:
> 
> > >On Thu, 14 May 1998, Alan Robinson wrote:
> > >
> > >> Userspace makes more sense to me, too, from the overall perspective, but
> > >> might it not then be more lagged?
> > >
> > >Lagged in what sense? I think it will do fine for midi/mod playback ;-)
> >
> > I am thinking in regard to realtime playback of a midi stream, such as from
> > a MIDI keyboard, etc.
> 
> Note: 90% of all users want only playback from soundcard. Next 5% should
> have MIDI keyboard and doesn't own WaveTable soundcard. The question is:
> Is something like Soft/OSS needed (in kernel of course) for real use?
> I'm thinking that it's interresant idea, but ALSA driver:
> 
> 1) shouldn't have this feature (it should exist in user space only for
>    playback - like games and players, not for MIDI sequencers)
> 2) this feature should be implemented in very far future (1-2 years) if
>    someone will work on this...
> 3) ALSA driver should be designed to allow this feature (of course)
> 
> Note: Nearly all new soundcards/soundchips have build-in WaveTable...
> 

<Humble opinion mode on>

 I think the future of sound is real time physical modelling.
At present processing power is too slow but in 5-10 years it should
be possible to do such things. The trouble with wave table stuff
is that  it is not very expressive. Compared to a real saxaphone which
allows the user to express himself using many schemes which alter the
wave form,  wavetable sythisis offers us a single high quality sample
which is invariably looped to save space. Even if memory becomes free
you would not be able to plug enough of it into your computer to store 
eough samples to allow a decent instrument to be stored. 

 OK most of the users will just want sound effects/music for games.
But I am interested in high quality audio stuff. 

<Humble opinion mode off>

 For any one interested. There is a C++ sound synthesis toolkit 

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~prc/


 At present I can get it to play out through the OSS /dev/dsp with a big
enough buffer
but if a try to make the loop to tight I get glitches. It should be very
easy to wrap
this tool kit up as a mididevice for asla. How is the audio going to be
shared (mixed) between
applications ?


 cheers Paul.

