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Could be Caml a good language for sound manipulation ?
-
Elthariel
- Julian Brown
- Evan Martin
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Date: | 2004-11-29 (03:21) |
From: | Julian Brown <brown@c...> |
Subject: | Re: Could be Caml a good language for sound manipulation ? |
On 2004-11-28, Elthariel <elthariel@free.fr> wrote: > Hello "les Cémaliens", > I'm quite new in oCaml world, I partially learnt it in my school (EPITA > / Paris) and I'm going to finish this next year. I'm not really ease in > english so my question will be short : do you think Caml coul be a nice > langage for sound manipulation implementation, as Synthetizers, effects > plugins ? I doesn't ask for answer in term of performance which should > be I guess quite good :p, but more in term of software design and > language facility. I can't really answer this very sensibly with my extremely limited experience in the area, but I will try anyway! I think that performance problems may hit you sooner than you might hope for real-time stuff. I was slightly surprised that my naive first attempt at audio-type programming with Ocaml failed to fill buffers fast enough with a bytecode-compiled executable, though native code is fine (this was on a 1GHz Athlon, YMMV). The trancendental functions and non-tail recursive functions I used might have something to do with it though. As for the manipulation of sound itself, yes, Ocaml is a lovely language! It may be better to stick with an imperative rather than functional programming style though, for reasons of performance. Also, under Linux, the low-level ioctl calls are a total pain, and require interfacing to C. You can have a look at this as an example if you like, though I don't expect it will be very useful to you: http://panic.cs.bris.ac.uk/~jules/beepy.tar.bz2 It needs lablgtk2, and probably won't work on anything but Linux. It's only been tested on x86. The sound.ml/sountctl.c files might be a useful starting point for some sort of sound output library, if you can't find anything else more suitable. Cheers, Julian