[ardour-dev] Using Ardour as a front end for loading DSP effects.

[James Courtier-Dutton]

Hi,

I was wondering how hard it would be to use the Ardour front end to load 
effects directly into the DSP of some sound cards. E.g. Creative Audigy2 
and E-MU cards. Is the Ardour GUI well abstracted from signal processing 
part, or are they very much linked? It would be nice if one could 
display channels inside the DSP and add effects to them all in Ardour. 
So, with Ardour, one could then mix DSP effects with central CPU 
software effects.

For example, I have recently implemented ALSA support for some E-MU 
cards, and it would be nice to use Ardour as a Linux version of PatchMix.

The complicated bit is changing the rate.
For 1x rate, normal 1 channel DSP code is used.
For 2x rate, 2 next door channels are used, each running at 1x rate, so 
different DSP code is needed.
The same again for 4x rate, i.e. 4 channels are used.

So, what do people think? Would this sort of feature be a step forward 
or a step backwards for Ardour?

James