From: Bill Kelly <billk@...>
Date: 2005-03-22T23:43:53+09:00
Subject: Re: FMOD or other sound libraries...anyone?

From: "Mathieu Bouchard" <matju@sympatico.ca>
> 
> I am maintainer for the Ruby bindings to PureData, which is a realtime
> visual programming language for audio. I am also the author of a video
> plugin for PureData, and actually those things are bundled together under
> the name GridFlow.

Awesome !!!!!

> It would be cool to have more elaborate bindings because the ones I have
> coded are rather minimal (that is, only what I need to have for the video
> plugin). In the future it would be cool to be able to have complete
> access to PureData objects, in the same way that the Python bindings to
> PureData can. Especially missing are ways to access audio buffers. I think
> it wouldn't be that difficult to implement, but I haven't needed them yet.

> PS: The big problem with audio and Ruby, though, is that the garbage
> collector takes too much CPU in one chunk, so that low-latency audio just
> fails horribly. For ordinary audio needs that's not really a problem
> unless the computer is slow, but many people want low-latency so that they
> can replace their expensive and unflexible guitar pedals by something
> extremely versatile, the computer.

I'm interested in both low-latency audio and MIDI... I've just
learned about PureData from your post, so haven't seen the 
internals yet.  I presume having "access" to audio buffers
from ruby for any kind of real-time work is probably somewhat
pointless anyway - unless ruby is making very high level calls
to perform operations on the buffers?

My inclination (again, not knowing PureData yet) would be to
want to put the real-time audio processing in a separate
thread, unaffected by ruby's GC.  Then have ruby be able to
configure what the audio thread is doing, without interfering
with it.

 . . .

GridFlow looks very, very cool.  I've been wanting to do something
similar (although different :)

From your web page:

 - Adding MSWindows display support (GDI or DirectX or SDL or...)

I'm writing a ruby extension at the moment called GLWindow.
The primary difference between SDL's OpenGL or GLUT is that
GLWindow supports multiple windows, all having a *shared* GL
context.  Also, it can open/close additional windows very
rapidly, and can continue updating while a window is being
moved/resized; basic stuff like that needed by my app.

So maybe it could be potentially useful for GridFlow?
(GLWindow is being developed on win32 now, but I want my
app to run on Linux and OS X too, so, eventually it'll be
on those platforms as well.)


Regards,

Bill