Amiga OS4 audio system

Hello,

would like to know if Amiga OS audio system would be updated someday.

I read somewhere that there was a plan to replace ahi, but i don't remember.

Any info about?

Do you think it needs to be replaced? Why?

Just because i read about this. I remember that there where plan to use a proprietary audio system. I will try to find the link.

Tony: It has been discussed before by both users and devs, bugs, fixes, features it lacks, musicprograms that does workarounds or cant do some stuff because of limit of ahi etc.

@tonyw

Quote:
Because AHI is not an audio system in the modern sense. It offers playback and recording, and that is all. Developers of audio applications need to develop everything themselves, from low-latency mixing routines to audio data routing and FX processing.

@trixie

What the options, then?

Btw, i found the old thread:

http://www.amigans.net/modules/xforum ... ve=0&mode=0&type=0&order=


it seems that Davy Wentzler have an interesting sound system. Edit: it seems not

I found this open source audio libraries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAL
http://sourceforge.net/projects/osalp/
http://www.portaudio.com/
http://essentia.upf.edu/

Don't know about licencing model, functionality and so on...

@trixie

Quote:

I hope we never get a modern audio system of the type you allude to.

Under windows and linux you essentailly need to switch the modern audio system off to do anything serious, on Windows this is by using the special low level drivers (forget the acronym) and on linux you need to run pasuspender to get rid of Pulse.

What we do need to is more advanced driver system with support for more than stereo / 7.1 input out and which doesn't bind the inputs and outputs togther like AHI does. Then a system like Jack to wire it all togther.

@broadblues

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Don't worry, nobody's going to write it anyway Nevertheless, the fact that other OSs have their audio systems cocked up (Linux is an especially horrible example) does not invalidate my point. AHI is fine, works well, but apart from simple playback and recording it's not very helpful.

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It's the other way round, actually. The components designed for modern audio operation - ASIO and VST - need to bypass/switch off the old and badly designed Windows audio system to do anything serious.

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Yes, that's pretty much what I'm talking about. Someting designed with independent audio streams and real-time operation in mind.

@trixie

I just tried my best to convince Marc Albrecht

He replied...

"To cut it short: I lost 80% of my Amiga sources during a HD crash in 2004 or so and did not bother to get anything of that stuff back. In my eyes it wasn't worth the trouble of sending old hard drives to some rescue service (and the backup tape, of course, wasn't readable).

ARTAS was a very "straight ahead" approach. It should be possible to redo it within a couple of days or weeks of full time development and with todays systems it might even be fun to kick VST ...."

Of course he is deluded by the old Amiga management...


Maybe someone else that know him can try again, who knows...

What do you think about setup a bounty for this?

I had a reply from Marc, maybe a bounty may help...

Why not just take the simplest route, and try to set together a collection of easy-to-use functions for the "low-latency mixing routines to audio data routing and FX processing" that's currently lacking?

I mean, when embarking what seems to be a huge project, one have to take into consideration what the benefits are. What would we get with a new sound system, that can't be achieved today? One or two more supported sound cards, a great sound system, unused by most applications, and potentially incompatible with AHI?

@jaokim

quoting trixie

"Because AHI is not an audio system in the modern sense. It offers playback and recording, and that is all. Developers of audio applications need to develop everything themselves, from low-latency mixing routines to audio data routing and FX processing."

@AmigaBlitter

Its not my intention to be evil or discouraging against these sort of efforts. I just don't see the point in adding yet another un(der)used framework, or standard, when there's little practical benefit. In theory it's a great project. But if developers today can circumvent AHI's lacking features by developing the features themselves, it must be possible to extract those functions into a generic set of opensource functions, or even include them in a library?


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Apparently the talented mr Spot/Up Rough has already an implentation of that library for OS4: http://os4depot.net/index.php?functio ... ibrary/audio/freealut.lha

What follows is my own opinion, right or wrong.

Some have spoken of updating AHI to do lots of cool modern things.
The more we update AHI, the less compatible it is.

AHI as it is now has a strength that will be hard to beat: It is the accepted standard across all Amiga-inspired platforms. and that is exactly what would serve the community best.

In my opinion, any "new" software would have to run beside AHI without causing trouble. I have considered a couple different things, but then I have FAR more projects than I have time to implement them.

This is not to say that AHI can't have a few features added.. but if it risks compatibility then I think it's probably not worth it.

I have a short list of things that would be very useful to add, but I have one thing preventing me from even trying.. I do all my programming on a native AmigaOS machine, and I have never been able to get any AHI code to compile here.
I will admit freely that I am no compiler guru, and the complexities of writing code that is cross-compatible on many different OSs is not easy to do.. But having said that, if I could compile the AHI sources from OS4 then there would be a very high likelihood that I could add a few of the features that I have been thinking about.
I have even implemented some of these with excessive use of SetFunction(), but I think that's a poor way to try and improve things.

So there's my real request:
If someone knows enough about configuring my compiler to build the AHI sources, or better yet configure the sources to compile in a "standard" AmigaOS dev kit, please contact me here or offlist.

:)

@jaokim

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Guess what Composite3DDemo uses for audio.
OpenAL does the 3D audio mixing such that the sound of the ball comes from where the ball is relative to the screen. It's particularly noticeable if you spin the room sideways. I'm still curious as to how it would sound with a surround-sound speaker system, as OpenAL should be able to handle that just fine.

OpenAL and ALUT aren't a driver system, though. They're just platform-independent API specifications.

Hans

@AmigaBlitter

What Marc Albrecht did?

What I would like to see is something like they have with the creative X-fi system. You can adjust for speaker distance from your ear, Chose from many different surround formats, Dolby, DTS, etc. Able to adjust for stereo effects, Jazz Hall,Amphitheater,Delay, etc. Also record what you hear. If this can all be done with in the AHI frame work and with a decent GUI, more power to us.

Chris

@Elwood

It's seems that someone else contacted him in the past 15 days. I'll prefer to keep the conversations with him private at this moment.

Thank you

@AmigaBlitter

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These are all high level audio libraries, none are replacements for AHI rather they would run on top of it.

As someone above stated OpenAL is already ported.