Proposition: Ecasound Blocking Audio Interface

Hi all,

Ecasound Blocking Audio Interface (EBAI)
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prologue
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I have for long have had the need some how to route audio to ecasound from my own little programs.

First approaches have been something like:

$ myprogram | ecasound -i stdin

but to use ecasound's wonderful multitracking capabilities, a more complex approach must be assumed.  Yet
it's simple: FIFOs.

So:

$ mkfifo track1.raw
$ mkfifo track2.raw

And when I have my program writing to those FIFOs, I can start ecasound on them:

$ ecasound -a 1 -i track1.raw -a 2 -i track2.raw

This works, but it is a pain to write the same things always all over again.  Hence, I propose standardization.

the API
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Keeping it simple.

*ECA_BLOCKING_AUDIO_INTERFACE

-open_port( name )

 Create EBAI port.

 In practice this means creating a FIFO to standard place, say:
"/tmp/eai-(ecasound-pid)/(port-name).raw", and then registering the port name alias to some place in
Ecasound Control Interface.

 So that through ECI you could do: "ai-add (port-name)", which would resolve to the full: "/tmp/eai-(ecasound-pid)/(port-name).raw".

 It is up to the API user to keep track of which ports are for writing and which for reading.

-write_port( name, data )

 Write data to the named port.

-read_port( name )

 Read data from named port.

-flush_port( name )

 Flush buffered data from named port.

And that's it.  Do we need more?

epilogue
--------

I'm pretty much set up to write the python implementation of this, integrating it with the native
implementation of ECI, but I thought it would be best to ask for comments first before doing it.

So comments are welcome,

 
janne

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