Blindly Coding (Posts about Libaudioverse)

A Libaudioverse Status Update

Austin Hicks — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 16:00:00 GMT

Libaudioverse is my attempt at making 3D audio for native apps, something which is currently lacking in the typical indie price range. There are other systems with fully featured content management pipelines, but these are often overkill for small projects, especially in terms of budgets. If you know Web Audio, you are already basically familiar with most of the core concepts. While there are differences, general architectural experience should be broadly transferable from one system to the other, and Libaudioverse aims to solve many of the same problems as Web Audio.

That said, this post is primarily aimed at those already familiar with Libaudioverse. I will probably have an entire series about what makes Libaudioverse relatively easy for one person to maintain at some point, but this post is about the short-term and long-term future. It recently came to my attention that there are people outside my small circle of developer friends who might be interested in knowing where I stand and where I'm going, so I thought I'd write something up.

This post will proceed roughly by major feature, discussing the status of each. The short version is that Libaudioverse isn't something that I want to call stable, but I'm certainly interested in getting feedback at this point; it's working well enough to be useful and the API is pretty settled.

The Horror of Audio Output

Austin Hicks — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 20:30:00 GMT

Update: I didn't realize there was a clarity issue, but the Hacker News thread made it clear that I should provide this clarification. I knew from the beginning of development that, no matter what I did, I'd need to support multiple backends. I had already written something like a third of the code that I would have to write by taking this route and, at some point, you just have to do it in the interest of actually moving forward. I am also developing a commercial library. To this end, some options that would otherwise be options are closed to me; I cannot use any dependency that my end users may need to purchase nor may I entertain the option of bringing in monolithic app development frameworks. Anyhow, back to your regularly scheduled blog post...

I've not been blogging recently because of two factors. The first of these is that we still do not have an accessible solution by which I can include math equations, save for me instructing you to learn LaTeX and view the source code of my articles; It would be incredibly hypocritical of me to make my blog posts inaccessible. The second is that the things I have been working on are somewhere between the domain of programming and math textbooks, with a bit of art and a lot of trial and error thrown in, so I simply haven't had anything interesting to say that fits into a blog post.

the latter of these has fixed itself and I expect I shall actually be posting semi-regularly again.

Today I want to talk about the horror of the world of audio output and all the wonderful broken promises you run into when you try. For a very long time, this was the hardest part of Libaudioverse, and I have had to literally give up on software libraries and at least one nice feature. I'm going to talk about this primarily in the form of an enumerated list of all the things I've had to try, talking about what's wrong with each one; if you're not interested in a post about various audio libraries and their brokenness, you can stop now. This is long, but I think it is worth chronicling so that others do not fall into the same pitfalls, something which has both frustrated me greatly and wasted weeks of Libaudioverse development time.

A Libaudioverse Preview

Austin Hicks — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 13:45:00 GMT

Note: it was pointed out to me that I forgot to mention enum34 in the readme. If you were getting errors about not being able to import enum, installing enum34 (not enum, enum34) will fix them.

I haven't spoken about Libaudioverse much, primarily because I find code much more valuable than articles on a blog. You can run the former. You can use the former for cool games and technologies. But Libaudioverse is now at the point where I can and should talk about it more. So I shall. And perhaps more importantly, I have something I can release. It's not alpha-quality, thus the term preview. But it can give you a feel for what this will be, and it has some cool example programs. If you want to skip straight to the preview and not read the rest of this post, you can get the windows binaries here.

A Big Status Update and a New Project

Austin Hicks — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 21:37:00 GMT

I've been quiet on this blog for a good while. Life got really busy. Here's everything that's been going on. The most major piece of news is that I'm a founding member of 3 Mouse Technology. We're well under way at this point and I can finally talk about it publicly. I'm also deprecating Camlorn_audio in favor of a new project. More about both of these below.