Re: Question Pertaining to nodes...

Am 14.11.2006 um 20:33 schrieb Richard Burnett:

I know there was some discussion at one point about pushing the node based processor sharing into the API for all to us, has there been any announcement of when we might see it in the API?

There has not been any such announcement yet, but if such an API was published it would certainly be announced here.

The great thing about distributed processing of AUs is that the AU protocol is already designed around a strict separation of UI and processing core, so there's not much extra API needed for an AU to be rendered on a distributed node while its UI runs on the main machine. As long as you implement your UI <-> processing core communication based on data transfer via properties and parameters (as opposed to passing pointers from one side to the other) your AU shall be pretty much node-ready.

Oh, and also make sure to post proper notifications when properties or parameters change (see AudioUnitEvents for details).

There are some additional details that may require an API extension to handle them properly (see below, and see also the other thread "SetProperty/GetProperty" started recently by Art), but the implementation overhead for these details shall be pretty minor and pretty easy to add to an existing AU.

Also, one thing I've been trying to find is if it is possible to use PowerPC and Intel based machines and nodes in either direction, or, do all the machines have to be the same architecture. I don't use Logic, so I'm not aware how it handles this issue.

Logics built-in plug-ins can run in a mixed-endian node-environment.

Handling endianess is one of the few issues where we'll most likely need some API additions if we open up node processing for AUs, but we'd try to make this as convenient as possible for AU developers. For example, Logic could take care of the endianess of all parameters and of all Apple-defined properties automatically, so the problem narrows down to handling private properties. As Niko pointed out in the other thread, there could be a property to query a dictionary that the AU can use to describe its remote processing needs to its host so that the host can do most if not all of the additional work for remote processing.

References:
	>Question Pertaining to nodes... (From: Richard Burnett <email@hidden>)