[ardour-dev] Cool idea or Crackhead ramblings

[Sampo Savolainen]

On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 14:00 -0400, Polashek, Matthew wrote:
> What if Ardour could take the place of, or integrate, envy24control or
> the hdsp mixer?  That would be neat-o!  Is this in the works?

Crackhead ramblings, mostly. But the good, visionary sort of crack.. :)

Like mr. McCoy said, Ardour works at a higher abstraction level than
hardware. Actually, Ardour shouldn't have _anything_ to do with audio
hardware, dealing with hw is jackd's problem. This abstraction is also
the reason why Taybin has been able to create OSX ports of both jackd
and ardour relatively easily. Clear API boundaries is essential for
porting applications, if you're a developer you will understand
otherwise you'll just have to take my word for it.

But: this isn't impossible to do in jackd. Jack already has some
monitoring options. Granted, these options are very simple and limited
to specific hardware. But it's not impossible to imagine a more complex
monitoring API evolving into post 1.0 versions of jack.

What this needs is a crack-free vision and design how to do this so that
it:
 a) will work for a wide variety of hardware
 b) actually provides something valuable to applications
    using jack
 c) is usable from the user POV / doesn't confuse the user

and most the most important one:

 d) What do you actually want to do with the hw mixers?
    How would you like to be able to control them from applications
    using jack (don't restrict yourself to Ardour) and how would
    other people like to control them.

You really need to answer d) before addressing a),b) or c).

Feel free to bounce ideas around. #lad, #jack, #ardour.

-- 
Sampo Savolainen <v2 at iki.fi>