Re: 'Ganged' or 'Linked' Hardware
Re: 'Ganged' or 'Linked' Hardware
- Subject: Re: 'Ganged' or 'Linked' Hardware
- From: Andrew Kimpton <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 12:41:07 -0700
Jeff Moore wrote:
I think that BJ summed things up quite well.
The philosophy of the HAL/IOAudio family is to do as little processing
in the driver as possible and to rely on the application to do all the
heavy lifting, especially when it comes to synchronizing multiple
devices. As BJ points out, this is really the only way to handle the
general case where an app wants to synchronize Device A from
Manufacturer B with Device X from Manufacturer Y.
This is not something I've really dived into in detail yet - but I have
to wonder: Is it really feasible to expect the application to either
take care of or more critically guide the user through the steps
required to ensure accurate sync between two disparate pieces of
hardware from different vendors.
For example many Macintosh's have built in audio hardware that can
capture audio, more serious users choose to augment this either with USB
based devices (even cheap ones like iMic, or more expensive devices such
as those from Edirol), some users choose to spend more money and acquire
hardware such as Metric Halo's or M-Audio's. The more expensive devices
often support an external clock source and some may provide an external
clock, the cheaper devices often don't, and the Apple built-in hardware
certainly doesn't.
So some devices are better candidates for working together than other's.
If applications are to have any chance of maintaining quality playback
and recording what are the mechanisms for determining that a list of
devices are 'compatible' with each other and have linked clock sources ?
How do I prevent a user from attempting to acquire two channels of audio
through the built in hardware, two channels through and iMic and 8 more
through a MobileIO ? This combination seems most unlikely to be able to
deliver a quality result which will result in customer support and
satisfaction problems.
Andrew 8-)
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