Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Elementary Audio: a modern platform for writing high performance audio software

elementary.audio

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 110 posts

Re: Elementary Audio: a modern platform for writing high performance audio software

#61

Post by jancsika »

iainctduncan wrote: post #53
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you understand that low-enough-latency audio doesn't take a super computer anymore It never did. Low latency audio has almost nothing to do with CPU power. Here's a summary of some of the issues faced on modern general purpose computers: https://manual.ardour.org/setting-up-your-system/the-right-c... I know how WASM and Web workers work. Since nothing you can do in WASM or a web worker has anything to do with ei…

And even when it doesn't require it, we always want it . :-)

And even when we set it, we don't get it, because we blithely read a "latency" label in a GUI instead of measuring the round-trip latency on the specific device in question.

Re: Elementary Audio: a modern platform for writing high performance audio software

#62

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Archit3ch wrote: post #60
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #49

It's hard to know what to say. > The conventional approach to writing audio software is an challenging process requiring expertise in a wide breadth of topics– C++, multi-threading and thread safety, lock-free programming, and realtime thread safety come to quickly to mind, and we haven't even mentioned digital signal processing itself. Moreover, the tooling, workflow, and developer experience that we have in this ap…

> SuperCollider or something similar remains more powerful and more flexible SuperCollider's license effectively stops you from designing commercial products. Even the free version of Elementary allows that.

Well, if you plan to release a commercial product based on writing JS, compiling that to WASM, running somehow inside or alongside a C/C++ core engine also compiled to WASM, both running in some standalone WASM environment ... good luck!

Elementary looks like a nice playground for audio if you have a web-leaning bent. Just like SuperCollider is a nice playground for audio if you are familiar with some its fundamental assumptions.

Neither of them seem appropriate to be the basis of products I would charge someone for, other than maybe as a one-off custom tool of some sort.

Re: Elementary Audio: a modern platform for writing high performance audio software

#63

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jancsika wrote: post #61
iainctduncan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And even when it doesn't require it, we always want it . :-)

And even when we set it, we don't get it, because we blithely read a "latency" label in a GUI instead of measuring the round-trip latency on the specific device in question.

That wouldn't be correct either, at least half the time. Problem is that "latency" is used with different meanings, at least two:

1. time from an acoustic pressure wave reaching a transducer (microphone), being converted to a digital representation, being processed by a computer, being converted back to an analog representation and finally causing a new acoustic pressure wave care of another transducer (speaker).

2. time between when someone uses some kind of physical control (mouse, MIDI keyboard, touch surface, many others) to indicate that they would like something to happen (a new note, a change in a parameter) and an acoustic pressure wave emerging somewhere that reflects that change.

The first one is "roundtrip" latency; the second one is playback latency.

Re: Elementary Audio: a modern platform for writing high performance audio software

#64

Post by abetusk »

Archit3ch wrote: post #60
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #49

It's hard to know what to say. > The conventional approach to writing audio software is an challenging process requiring expertise in a wide breadth of topics– C++, multi-threading and thread safety, lock-free programming, and realtime thread safety come to quickly to mind, and we haven't even mentioned digital signal processing itself. Moreover, the tooling, workflow, and developer experience that we have in this ap…

> SuperCollider or something similar remains more powerful and more flexible SuperCollider's license effectively stops you from designing commercial products. Even the free version of Elementary allows that.

What are you talking about? SuperCollider is licensed under GPLv3 [1].

[0] https://github.com/supercollider/supercollider#license

Re: Elementary Audio: a modern platform for writing high performance audio software

#66

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

ushakov wrote: post #8
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does say you can make plugins, but the link doesn't work. It would be huge if you could make cross-platform AU/VST*/AAX without the costs of JUCE, but I suspect that isn't on offer here.

still not convinced you can make cross-platform plugins without JUCE by using iPlug, Faust or even Rust the selling point of this seems to allow js/web developers to build plugins and we already know what happened when web developers were allowed to build desktop apps (Electron) luckily given real-time and cpu constraints this might never happen to Audio Plug-ins

Also, DPF. And if you're willing to use D, DPlug.

Re: Elementary Audio: a modern platform for writing high performance audio software

#67

Post by worik »

hamasho wrote: post #58
bricklebrack wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my new favorite comment for illustrating the perilous future of general computing and how it needs to be taken away from JavaScript if we have any chance of survival. Electron, Webassembly fetishism, the pursuit of language synchrony at the expense of common sense, it all gets you this. This comment. Right here. This is the future of software and it should scare the shit out of you. Let me get this straight:…

I'm a web person defending web things but providing something on the web has a significant advantage. I know you've heard this again and again, but I can't emphasize it enough. You can use the site from most platforms, including PCs and mobiles. You don't have to install software, a single click is enough. Of course, browsers have considerable limitations, and serious users will eventually choose other tools, but pro…

> You can use the site from most platforms, including PCs and mobiles. You don't have to install software, a single click is enough. Of course, browsers have considerable limitations, and serious users will eventually choose other tools, but providing such an accessible software is a really huge advantage for me.

In the audio world that is cool for toys.

There are a lot of really cool things to play with in the browser/multi media space, maybe this is another.

But when it comes to getting shit done, writing plugins and transports, creating instruments and rigs for live use (my hobby these days) the quite demeaning comments here are on the mark.

This "Elementary" is prioritising the wrong things. And there are a lot of frame works that do not require you know C or C++

Pure Data, and Sonic Pi are two I have played with (the former much more than the latter).

Platform independence is simply not an issue when building these systems. Installing software is not an important issue.

Sorry. This is, on the face of it, a waste of time. I hate saying that, but if it were me doing this I would pitch it as a fun toy.

Re: Elementary Audio: a modern platform for writing high performance audio software

#68

Post by worik »

replygirl wrote: post #41
iainctduncan wrote: post #15

Maybe I'm missing something from my quick read, but the idea of using this for plugins seems like a real misfire. I'm curious whether the devs come from the pro audio world at all. It's one area where prioritizing for development time by using high level garbage collected languages just isn't done because your user is always concerned with how many instances they can run and what the lowest latency they can get is, a…

my friend is running an independent studio, i'm a bedroom musician, and we're planning some elementary plugins together. we tried some stuff with max and it wasn't expressive enough, we tried the steinberg sdks but they were too much of a lift, elementary is good enough for our workflows and in that perfect zone with enough control and enough familiarity that we feel we can be productive. we'll see in due time if it'…

If you can tolerate graphical programming, the successor to Max, Pure Data, really rocks.

Re: Elementary Audio: a modern platform for writing high performance audio software

#69

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #49

It's hard to know what to say. > The conventional approach to writing audio software is an challenging process requiring expertise in a wide breadth of topics– C++, multi-threading and thread safety, lock-free programming, and realtime thread safety come to quickly to mind, and we haven't even mentioned digital signal processing itself. Moreover, the tooling, workflow, and developer experience that we have in this ap…

As a total outsider to the audio programming world, what's the best in class framework / environment to be writing plugins in in 2022 if one were to start today?

Re: Elementary Audio: a modern platform for writing high performance audio software

#70

Post by gavinray »

It's probably helpful to have some background context for the development of this

The author of this library is also the author of the React JUCE renderer. It's a toolkit that re-uses React Native's rendering engine to allow you to use JS and React to render JUCE components:

https://www.nickwritesablog.com/blueprint-a-juce-rendering-b...

https://github.com/JoshMarler/react-juce

So at this point, you have a (presumably) C++ JUCE app that is using JS/TS to render the UI. Why not work to move DSP stuff into JS as well, so that you're gluing minimal bits of C++ together?

It's not a far leap from there to here when you follow this line of thinking down the road.

Post reply on HN