Re^2: Insight needed: Perl, C, Gtk2, Audio, Threads, IPC & Performance

Actually, the mixing part of the program is more or less done already - it's all handled by compiled C plugins. I discarded SDL from consideration because it doesn't seem to give me enough low level access: I need to be able to generate audio streams quickly and dump them on the sound device (something like 40 samples at a time, that's once every ~0.001 second).

SDL has a lot of nice routines for playing & mixing long samples & streams, but nothing that gives me that kind of response. Or so it seems to me reading the docs. If you or anyone else have tried something like this with SDL, I'd be happy to hear your stories :-)

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

Comment on Re^2: Insight needed: Perl, C, Gtk2, Audio, Threads, IPC & Performance - Oh My!

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Re^3: Insight needed: Perl, C, Gtk2, Audio, Threads, IPC & Performance - Oh My! by sfink (Deacon) on Jun 06, 2006 at 00:49 UTC
I use SDL_mixer, and I would echo your conclusion: it doesn't give enough low level access. It's fine for playing one background music track and doing fire & forget sound effects, but that's it. For my project, that's just barely kinda mostly sorta good enough for now, but the next time I revisit audio I'll be switching to either OpenAL or the raw ALSA API. I want to be able to change the volume of a triggered sound effect while it's playing. I want an immediate notification of when a sound has completed so I can sequence something else (non-audio) after it. I want to get feedback about how far through a sound I am. I want to do pitch bending. I wouldn't mind some 3D sound processing (although I think SDL_mixer can do some of that.)	[reply]

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Re^3: Insight needed: Perl, C, Gtk2, Audio, Threads, IPC & Performance - Oh My!
by sfink (Deacon) on Jun 06, 2006 at 00:49 UTC

I use SDL_mixer, and I would echo your conclusion: it doesn't give enough low level access. It's fine for playing one background music track and doing fire & forget sound effects, but that's it. For my project, that's just barely kinda mostly sorta good enough for now, but the next time I revisit audio I'll be switching to either OpenAL or the raw ALSA API. I want to be able to change the volume of a triggered sound effect while it's playing. I want an immediate notification of when a sound has completed so I can sequence something else (non-audio) after it. I want to get feedback about how far through a sound I am. I want to do pitch bending. I wouldn't mind some 3D sound processing (although I think SDL_mixer can do some of that.)

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