everyone having fun with the Digidesign CoreAudio drivers?
everyone having fun with the Digidesign CoreAudio drivers?
- Subject: everyone having fun with the Digidesign CoreAudio drivers?
- From: Christopher Penrose <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2003 18:14:56 -0400
I am debugging my Mbox capable audio playback code and I just can't
believe how unfriendly these Digidesign coders are to others. If you
have the Digidesign CoreAudio drivers installed and you send an
AudioDeviceStart(), regardless of whether or not the Digidesign
hardware is the current audio output hardware, the user is forced to
wait 3-4 seconds to load the driver. I find whenever I am not using
the mbox that I have to de-install the CoreAudio drivers to get serious
work done... The waiting is absurd... particularly as it effects ANY
playback hardware, not just the "lock you into our product" mBox. Why
can't this asinine delay be present only when the mBox is the currently
selected hardware? It is one thing for the behavior to effect only
your product, but when it degrades the use of everyone else's it
behooves you to recognize that you are in error.
To add insult to injury -- annoying messages are sent to the STDOUT
(why not the STDERR or /dev/null?) whenever AudioDeviceStart() is
called. Here is the nuisance:
"Digidesign CoreAudio Driver: Succesfully acquired DirectIO, our PID
is: 863"
PLUS....
"*** malloc[867]: Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0xffffffff;
This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an
allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see
tools to help debug"
I get to see their deallocation errors whenever I use ANY CoreAudio
hardware driver.... Nice folks. The message promptly goes away if I
uninstall the digidesign CoreAudio drivers. The cycle of
install/deinstall has become quite the routine.
While some people may not understand why this is annoying.. it creates
all kinds of work when you are trying to debug code as you can't simply
redirect to the stdout data that you would like to isolate out of a
program.
Does anyone happen to have contact information for CoreAudio developers
at Digidesign. They really need to learn something about good software
citizenship. I could be complaining that the driver is single client,
which makes their product useless for many important audio
applications, but how can anyone expect interoperability from the
company that makes Protools? "WHO COULD POSSIBLY EVER WANT TO USE
SOFTWARE OTHER THAN PROTOOLS? =) The mBox works great with
Protools!!! We must be all done with the driver now!"
Christopher
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