Llama's and Intuition's Techie Thread

[kraft]

The first thing to do is to leave KDE, try WindowMaker, i used it as basis for working and it leaded me to a successfull GUI without the burden of arts, kde and all this garbage. With DirectFB there's one potential trouble with the gps software which requires an X server

[intuitionsys]

Changing the window manager is low priority. That's easily doable. The reason Silverwolf uses KDE is because of some shortcuts in implementing the spectrum analyzer (specifically ripping FFT data from the sound stream). FMOD removes all external reliances on anything to do with sound wrt Silverwolf (except Xine sound output that I'm using for video playback).

re Xine output, any forseeable issues with piping raw PCM to FMOD (excluding the obvious preformatting of rate, word size and endianness)? I haven't even looked into it I just thought of it now. I can use a socket intermediary or a handle to stdin (preferrable the former) to get the data to the library.

[kraft]

lol i know it's easy i think you misunderstood me and FMOD is not all.
Starting with Windowmaker or other lightweight window manager from the begining will save time and avoid searching unforeseen troubles later but it's up to you

This remembers me another thread about a phone control software.

[intuitionsys]

lol i know it's easy i think you misunderstood me and FMOD is not all.
Starting with Windowmaker or other lightweight window manager from the begining will save time and avoid searching unforeseen troubles later but it's up to you

This remembers me another thread about a phone control software.

I'm not starting from scratch (I've been using Silverwolf for over a year now) so it's a moot point. I'm more concerned with FMOD right now. One of the driving concerns I've gotten in e-mails is the install and setup are so complicated and using FMOD will clean up alot of crap and simplify the setup in one fell swoop.

[intuitionsys]

Llama have you found you need to glean a fairly large array from getSpectrum() to get a reasonably accurate display? Using 64 and graphing the results wasn't nearly as accurate as sampling 1024 then subsampling to 64 (the number of meters in the analyzer). I'm also doing the logarithmic dB conversion on the fly, clipping to -120dB dynamic range (anything beyond that is dreaming anyway )

My development platform is a P4 3.6 GHz so it will be interesting to see if the FP unit on the 1.2 GHz C3 can keep up to that many transforms every 100ms...

btw FMOD is the cat's <insert favorite expletive here>. It really does work as well as advertised. I'm almost done moving everything over well in advance of what I thought it would take. The hacking and chopping of irrelevant aRts and MPG123 related code is a good thing too.

[TheLlama]

Yeah, I'm grabbing 512 values in the analyser array. If you look at analyserScale, that is what I use for sampling the 512 values into 40 values. Hehe, yeah FMOD really is great. I want to try using FMOD Ex in the next day or two.

[intuitionsys]

I'll post the code on silverwolf.intuitionsys.com when 1.3 reaches fruition if you're curious. The major changes will be in audio.cpp/h (new wrapper class for fmod) and fft.cpp/h.

[intuitionsys]

I'm finding I'm getting MUCH better results using linear scaling as opposed to logarithmic scaling. I'm just wondering if there isn't a mistake in the docs for FMOD Ex...

Basically fSpec[i] = -120.0 * fSpec[i] / fMax for each channel yields what you would expect to get from the logarithmic conversion. All the math in the display is linear so I'm kinda thinking maybe the data is already scaled (in Ex anyway).

[strandtc]

Okay.. Stupid Question

I realize FMOD is an audio library.. and that you're writing front ends. I too am writing a front end, but have not gotten to the audio part of it yet.

Does FMOD do everything from loading the file, give you spectrum data, do your mixer settings, and send it to your audio device.... or does it do some subset of this?

I'm writing my code in QT4.1 / C++. Would what you're working on apply to what I hope to soon be doing?

-Chris

[intuitionsys]

Okay.. Stupid Question

As Dr. Craig Hawkins would say, "the only stupid question is the one not asked"

Does FMOD do everything from loading the file, give you spectrum data, do your mixer settings, and send it to your audio device.... or does it do some subset of this?

Yes on all three. It won't act as a master daemon like esd or artsd but if all the audio originates within your app you're okay.

I'm writing my code in QT4.1 / C++. Would what you're working on apply to what I hope to soon be doing?

I would think so. Silverwolf (my app) has actually been complete (and available for download) for some time now but I'm in the process of gutting the audio subsections to use FMOD, mainly so I no longer need to rely on aRts, KDE or MPG123. The biggest challenge will be piping Xine audio (what I use for the video subsections - DVD ISOs, TV, etc.) to my app since it runs as a seperate process.

btw alot of mine uses Qt 3.3.5 (3.3.6 as of yesterday). I may jump on the 4.1 bandwagon eventually...