[Pipet Devel] XML-RPC

[Jean-Marc Valin]

> This is ultimately more important to Piper than it may first appear.  The
> initial impression that most people may get of Piper is that it is a system
> for /sequencial/ data flow (the data is passed to the next node only when the
> current node is done).  If we didn't have Overflow at the core of Piper, this
> may be true.  But Overflow is such a fast system that we want to include
> /streaming/ data flow.  Here's an excerpt from one of Jean-Marc's (Overflow
> developer) recent e-mails:
> 
> Jean-Marc wrote:
> > I just thought this might be interesting to some of you, as a demo of what
> > Overflow can do. I just "wrote" an Overflow program (.n) that performs real-time
> > audio processing. It reads the soundcard input, normalized the volume (lowers
> > louder sounds, amplifies lower sounds), and sends the result back to the
> > soundcard output. It takes less than 5% CPU on my Athlon 500 at 44.1kHz/stereo
> > (I use chunks of ~10 ms). Note, you need a full-duplex soundcard and the latest
> > version in CVS to try it. Any electric guitar player here would like to help me
> > write distortions and other effects?

I'd just like to explain a bit more here. There is no special "streaming
feature" in Overflow. What allows me to process sound in real-time is that
Overflow, as any "language", allows loops (it takes a while to get used to loops
-- we call them "Iterator" networks -- in a data-flow). If you want to do
streaming, it's your responsability to cut down your nodes so they can work on a
chunk of data. If you do that, then you can stream. As for the speed of the
network, it won't give you CD quality in real-time, but it can allow you to
split an hour-long processing in chunks of 1 minute.

	Jean-Marc

-- 
Jean-Marc Valin
Universite de Sherbrooke - Genie Electrique
valj01 at gel.usherb.ca