John, thanks for the info and congratulations for SFront, looks impressive.
You wrote on July 1 (found in the archive) :
"with the Microsoft compilers, we actually have gotten to the point of
real-time interaction demos with that combination (although the Direct Sound
driver currently with sfront is very preliminary, best case it will hang up
your machine after around 5 minutes ... we're still debugging it)."
If I understand correctly, this version of SFront outputs source code files
which when compiled by the MSVC compiler result in an interactive realtime
software synth, which is absolutely fantastic !
If I may, I would suggest producing vst2 plugins rather than standalone apps.
And provide a vst2 host so people who don't have a sequencer can still run the
produced plugins (writing a vst host is remarkably easy : Steinberg provides
sample code for that. It's vst1 for the moment, but can be easily adapted if
one can't wait for the updated sample code).
**Advantages for SFront** :
- This would let the host take care of platform-specific things like GUI,
MIDI, audio i/o and scheduling, some of which may be difficult to write from scratch.
- SFront users wouldn't need to buy MSVC : I think they could get away with gcc.
- Synths would compile faster since there would be much less code to compile.
**Advantages of vst2 plugins relative to standalone apps for musicians** (most
of whom use sequencers to compose their music) :
- a single audio callback for both the sequencer and the synth, instead of two
"colliding" callbacks (such as Micrologic + reality : large tempo fluctuations).
- sampleframe accurate MIDI.
- DirectX audio output using a primary buffer (direct access to the
soundcard's buffer : improved latency) is possible for one app only.
- the sequencer can get/record the synth's audio output without the
need/problems of an audio loopback utility such as VAC.
- the sequencer can get/record the synth's MIDI output without the
need/problems of a MIDI loopback utility such as Hubi's.
- faster than real time rendering is possible
Hope this makes sense.
John Lazzaro wrote:
>
> Saturday night UC Berkeley had a pretty bad power glitch on its cogenerator --
> it wiped out most of our RAID servers, including the one that hosts the
> website that sfront was on. Estmated time for the disk to come back on line
> is next Monday ... so that's when the website will be back up.
-- Greetings, Michel ......................................................................... Michel Jullian Directeur General email mj@exbang.com Exbang Industries S.A. Mas Chauvain route de Villeneuve tel +33(0) 499 529 878 Maurin 34970 Lattes France fax +33(0) 499 529 879 .........................................................................
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