Re: aspiring CoreAudio devs
Re: aspiring CoreAudio devs
- Subject: Re: aspiring CoreAudio devs
- From: Paul Davis <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2012 08:52:47 -0400
On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 8:16 PM, Ariel Elkin
<email@hidden> wrote:
Violins are made of wood, but you don't need to be an expert in botany to make good violins. If you're building tools for music, then you need to concern yourself with what's important to your users: beautiful and unique sounds, and an intuitive interface to control them. In other words, an engaging audio-based user experience.
i found this rather curious advice, or perhaps, a curious metaphor.
you don't need to be an expert in botany to make good violins, but you're generally going to be an expert in woodworking of a particular type, and you're probably going to know a great deal about wood and varnish and a variety of other things that are probably not of much interest to violin players (other than the few who are curious about the more subtle aspects of their instruments).
likewise, the notion that you can create good synthetic instruments without knowing quite a lot about what you're working with seems a little strange to me. you probably don't need to know much about assembler-level details of how computers work, and you definitely don't need to understand silicon-level stuff. but not understanding the costs of certain ways implementing a particular algorithm, not understanding the pitfalls of realtime programming (*), not being aware of some of the tradeoffs between using memory vs. using computation (and how they change over time) ... these are are the sorts of things that ultimately lead to the difference between a great instrument and one that sounds good only if the player "holds it right".
(*) i'm suprised that nobody has yet mentioned ross bencina's vital overview of realtime programming:
http://www.rossbencina.com/code/real-time-audio-programming-101-time-waits-for-nothing
being unfamiliar with the ideas that ross covers is an almost certain pathway to creating low quality audio software.
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