AU Validation Tool
AU Validation Tool
- Subject: AU Validation Tool
- From: Bill Stewart <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2003 00:55:29 -0700
Interesting that tonight's questions about AU behaviour should come
up...
So, its become increasingly apparent to us, that alot of the host apps
are having difficulties working out how to deal with a more and more
disparate set of behaviours for audio units. Some of this I think is
due to us not being as clear as we should be about expected behaviour,
and also a lack of strong validation tools for Audio Units.
Its been a very interesting 6 months, particularly given the very
welcome involvement and commitment that you've shown to understanding
how AU do work and even better (and more accurate!) should work. Your
contributions have been both valuable and very welcome - so thank you.
(Ever get the feeling there's bad news coming:-)
So - to attempt to tighten up the behaviour that both an AudioUnit
developer and a developer hosting Audio Units can expect, we believe
that some effort should be made to produce a tool that can be used by
both sides of the fence to validate the behaviour of an Audio Unit.
This tool I believe, should describe both conditions that should be
rectified (Errors) and situations that, whilst not ideal, are not fatal
(Warnings).
Rather than make this broadly available at this stage, I'd like to
preflight this with a number of developers who are *actively* (please!)
developing audio units or writing host apps that wish to validate the
audio units they are hosting. The main intention of this seed is to
begin a conversation to ascertain:
(1) Is the tool missing problems that it should be catching?
(2) Is the tool to stringent/not stringent enough?
Its unrealistic (just to set expectations a bit) that the tool can
completely validate an AU of course - what it is attempting to do is to
give some assurity (like a MIDI Spec sheet does for a MIDI device for
instance) that a given AU is both conformant to the "spec" and to
provide potential users some description of the general facilities that
the AU publishes.
The tool is a command line tool - it does NOT validate the behaviour of
the UI Component - and I expect that the AUHosting app will still
remain a tool that is used to validate those behaviours that it
embodies.
How this will work...
If you are interested in participating in this process:
(1) Send me an email - please include details of the AU (or host Apps)
that you are working on (if you don't think I know)
(2) I'll send you a copy of the tool - it will time out after a
shortish period
(3) I expect a couple of things from those that participate in this:
(a) I'll add their email addresses to a private email list - so we can
take any discussions about this off this main list (This is NOT a
matter of keeping anything secret - but just keeping the traffic off
the API list)
(b) I expect some feedback - at least the report sheet and preferably
comments and suggestions.
(c) If for NDA or other reasons you don't want to be known to other
developers of your involvement in this - then that is fine. You'll
still be added to the list, but other members of the list cannot find
out you are on the list, and you can send me feedback privately.. the
list will at least be used to notify the participants of updates...
Obviously an open discussion is preferred, but I can also appreciate
and will honour company policies about non-disclosure.
I think that's it.
Maybe after this is done, we'll write an AU to validate the hosting
semantics of host apps - I'm sure its not just AUs that have problems,
so please don't think that's the intention here!!!
Thanks again
Bill
--
mailto:email@hidden
tel: +1 408 974 4056
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