[PD-dev] alsa rme pd again

Winfried Ritsch ritsch at iem.kug.ac.at
Wed Aug 14 13:03:47 CEST 2002


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From: =?X-UNKNOWN?Q?g=FCnter_geiger?= <geiger at xdv.org>
To: Orm Finnendahl <finnendahl at folkwang-hochschule.de>
cc: <pd-list at iem.kug.ac.at>
Subject: Re: [PD-dev] alsa rme pd again
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 16:38:39 +0200 (CEST)


Hello,

[...]
> > > The ALSA code in pd is just missing the direct way, that is, sending
> > > non-interleaved samples.
> >
> > Are you sure, ALSA can handle this? I thought, ALSA doesn't work with
> > uninterleaved samples. If that's the case, I'd much prefer the direct
> > way of course.
> >
> > Who can help in that respect? ALSA documentation is still hardly more
> > than nonexistent and the API far from straightforward.

> Someone with enough time, programming experience and the ultimate goal to
> save the (musicians) world with free software :)
> No, honestly, I have looked at the code a bit already, then I got stuck
> because it is a bit a try and error sort of programming.
> Now currently my desktop machine which hosts the Hammerfall is broken :(.

> I think alsa offers now two different "write" and "read" functions, one
> for interleaved and anotherone for non-interleaved.

I think we should have a look on some CASE Studies to get to an answer.

Here my experience ALSA:

Last I tried ALSA-RME/pd was 1.5 years ago (Hammerfall, not DSP one):
The ALSA RME drivers supports mmap interface and non-interleaved
samples in native mode, (but no interleaved stereo which is as bad as
my first driver), so thanx to guenter he made a kind of oss driver (in
kernel now) out of it, so a additional stereo-device exist. 

But if you use alslib, which is the preferred way there is always a
copy from Soundcardbuffer to a alsabuffer to pretend memory map, so
the memory mapping of the soundcardbuffer isnt accessed directly, also
the samples are not converted for example in floats, so pd has to copy
an convert again. Anyway when I got something to work (from examples)
there was a new release which broke everything even that I used alsalib
(maybe using the alsa devices is more stable), so my decision was dont
touch ALSA again until it will be 1.0 and stabilize, which was said to be
soon, but now its 1.5 years later and no 1.0.

---
I would like to find an answer to following questions, how to set up
linuxboxes with pd in studios to be used by students, componists, etc.:

Question A: What is the preferred way to use pd and other soundapps with
hammerfall to get small latency and stable drivers and many apps which
are supported by this ? 

Since now computers quite fast so one copy more is not taking 10% of
CPU-time like in last days: We used pd with 2 hammerfalls and 48
channels on PIII 800MHz taking about 20-30% of CPU only for a copy
through on pd within 10ms, on a Athlon 2000+, DDR-RAM it took about 5%
and we got to 5ms.

Question B: Has sombody experience with ALSA drivers ?

Question C: Has sombody experience with 16(8)-channels usage on an
Hammerfall DSP and laptop and/or Desktop ?




mfg winfried ritsch



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