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

[Marc-Olivier Barre]

On 12/2/06, James Courtier-Dutton <James at superbug.co.uk> wrote:
> 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

I won't say it's impossible, but is it really what we want ? Ardour is
meant to be completely independent from the hardware and relies on
jack as far as communicating audio to anything is concerned.
Letting jack and only jack talk to the sound card is what I like most
about audio under Linux. Making ardour behave differently depending on
the hardware used would make things difficult to use, develop and
maintain. I am not sure it's worth it.

__________________
Marc-Olivier Barre,
Markinoko.