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Re: [Portaudio] Re: portaudio in Debian, license updates?



Let me say as a long time member of this list and user of Portaudio and its proponent in many projects, there was a period of a year where this project was a big time user of Ambien. It was asleep for the most part. A few folks came along and woke it up.


Flex Radio depends heavily on PortAudio in its commercial offerings. I shudder to think what would have been done without it. While the support for WDM-KS is not complete, Flex Radio contributed back the WDM-KS driver in a usable state. It has instabilities but it should be possible to finish from there. I proposed its use for this commercial offering and Eric Wachsmann of Flex has done a great job with using, adding, and giving back the WDM-KS code to that which was in a stale and unusable state for a long time.

Arve Knudsen has almost single handedly changed my view of PortAudio for Linux.

I added PortAudio support for the Linux version of WSJT:

http://pulsar.princeton.edu/~joe/K1JT/index.htm

and helped it become an open source project supported on berlios. This support includes support for ALSA, OSS, and Jack. It is an invaluable tool in making this python, C, Fortran project a cross platform offering. Essentially the same code runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, and soon on Mac because of PortAudio.

I have constructed a module for GnuRadio to support PortAudio because of my experiences in support of WSJT. I hope that comes together in the next couple of weeks:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/  and http://comsec.com/wiki

and intend to add the same kind of PortAudio support for the DSP which underlies the Flex Radio SDR in this project:

http://dttsp.sourceforge.net

We are doing this because of the RECENT forward motion in the support of the *nix, MacIntosh computers and Coreaudio.

On the Linux offerings, I have seen none of the instability you mention. I have used it on jack, alsa, and oss with great success.

As a regular user of Audacity, I would view it as a real turn off if PortAudio support was deprecated in Audacity. It is my opinion that while development on PortAudio has proceeded in fits and starts, it has proceeded and with a bit more help, could easily congeal to a nice form. We desperately need a cross platform audio API like this and RtAudio is not it. It is my view IMNSHO that a better thing would be for Audacity and other developers to stop whining and start helping. I would strongly support a Debian compatible license but Ross and PA are going to have a heck of a time tracking down all developers and getting the signed pieces of paper needed.

KEEP PA IN AUDACITY.

Bob



Ross Bencina wrote:
Hi Guys

I'm the dev lead for PortAudio.

Matt Brubeck wrote:
Junichi Uekawa wrote:
Things like portaudio and MIDIshare never really arrived. (OK, I'm
exaggerating slightly - Doesn't Audacity use portaudio?)

Audacity does use portaudio. Portaudio isn't dead and gone, but
development is barely progressing. With portaudio-v19 audacity can
use jack.

There are numerous active commercial applications which depend on PortAudio.. it is far from dead and gone. Quite naturally I believe it to be a technically superior solution to RtAudio, primarily because (last time I checked) RtAudio does not attempt to solve many of the technical problems which PortAudio does.

Best wishes

Ross.




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