Re: [rtl] RTL on ARM (Netwinder)

[David Olofson <david.olofson@reologica.se>]

Looks very interesting, indeed!!! It is good to see that one company after another
is getting serious about Linux, 'cause I'm fed up with Mickeysoft BS!

I'm the founder of the Audiality project, which will be released under GNU as soon
as enough of the structure has been designed and tested.

Audiality is a music recording system, with flexibility far beyond that of today's
recording systems. The engine handles (among other things) free signal routing
(serial, tree, feedback(!)...), true realtime (you can use plugin effects on the
mike and hear the result in your headphones!) and integrated sampler/synthesizer
with virtual memory (in fact, the sample player and the harddisk player are one).
The engine is also designed to transparently handle multiprocessing, both SMP and
network clusters.

The Audiality engine could in fact be used as a general purpose signal processing
kernel for systems with complex signal routing. (We're talking flexible run-time
plugin architecture and input-output delay less than 1 ms.) All you would need is
a driver for your AD/DA hardware and some suitable plugins, and you could build
real-time DSP programs graphically under X!

You can check out audiality.base.org, but the site is on the abandoned Windoze
project, and has not been updated for ages... (Aaaarrggh!! Windoze caused only
trouble, and the GUI sucks. Waste of time. I should have figured.) The philosophy
and ideas are about the same, though.

The RT-Linux patch was what finally made me drop the Windoze buffered server + RTK
realtime server model, and move the whole project to Linux. (What a relief... You
don't have to fight the OS, you can actually use it!) The new model allows the
whole recording system to be run on one workstation, but it would probably be
better to run the GUI on a small, *silent* workstation, as opposed to my
"vacuum-cleaner" dual PII-233 with 7200 rpm HD...

That's where NetWinder seems to fit in. It might also be a sollution for low-end
single workstation systems, which in turn would require RT-Linux, in order to
support the real time audio features. Don't know how silent a NetWinder would be,
but the low power consumption looks interesting (no "vacuum cleaner" fan...?).
Also, the built-in flash seems nice since I was thinking diskless for the GUI
terminal + audio server model.

So, I'll check it out, and if it's silent, I'll buy one! If I do, I will be very
interested in an RT-Linux port.

Signal processing RT-Linux users:
I will have to convert some sound card drivers, so if anyone is about to use sound
cards with RTL, I'm interested!

David

PS.
Sorry, for lots of text and lack of updated web sites. I'm writing songs, singing,
designing a mid-engine car, developing Audiality and I work as a programmer (using
RT-Linux, offcourse!). Some projects stall for a moment sometimes... ;-)
DS.


--- [rtl] ---
For more information on Real-Time Linux see:
http://www.rtlinux.org/