Re: "Acid" from Sonic Foundary

[John Recker <john@rendition.com>]

>don't know, but wouldn't the audio path latencies on the PC make this 
>kinda
>hard? Nice thing about the hardware loopers is that all they do is move
>audio data around, so the latency is unnoticably small. (1-2 ms). With
>today's PCs the latency is far greater than that (20-300+ms?), so I would
>guess that real-time looping applications wouldn't work so well.


On win95, one can play around with the system timer and generate 
timer events to a VxD with <3ms latency.

Combine this with the new generation of scatter/gather DMA PCI cards 
(Turtle Beach (www.tbeach.com) will start selling its Montego card next 
week that seems quite nice: 18bit AD/DA, 16 hardware digital mixers 
with independant sample rates, 32 voice HW wavetable synthesis for $129), 
and it seems like it might be possible to write some software that 
combines the 
features of the software mixers/Midi sequencers with the looping features 
of the 
hardware loopers. I don't know, however, if this can be done through a 
generic 
interface such as DirectSound or whether acheiving the low latencies 
required for 
this type of application requires sound card specific knowledge.


This is probably fairly off topic for this list.
I have, however, been thinking of writing some SW of this nature
and would be interested in exchanging ideas with anyone that has
played around in this space.

jr