[haskell-art] Cross-platform Audio I/O (was Re: Sox wrapper)

[Eric Cheng]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 2:44 PM, John Lato <jwlato at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is any of this work available yet?  I've recently been heading in the
> direction of an arrow-based DSP/synthesis DSL as a back-end for one of
> my projects, but I haven't put much time in yet.  If your group has
> already been doing something similar, I'd much prefer to use that
> (after a stable release) and spend my time on other stuff, provided
> your features overlap with what I need.

Not quite yet, as the interface is still in constant flux.  There are
some pieces that are missing, the most important being an arrow
pre-processor that performs the optimizations we need.  But we will
get it out this summer since there will be a new course taught at Yale
this fall on FRP/sound synthesis that uses the new framework.

>> We plan to have a release this summer, so I've been looking for a
>> cross-platform audio solution too.  So far I have been using my
>> home-grown PortAudio FFI wrapper (the PortAudio library on hackage
>> didn't exist when I first started out!).  I think it's a fine library,
>> since it works wonderfully on Linux and Mac, but it seems to be a lot
>> of pain to get it to work on Windows, which I think is a big problem.
>
> Is this a problem with the FFI wrapper or PortAudio itself?  If the
> former, that can likely be fixed.  The latest cabal appears to have
> much better support for C libraries, and the current c2hs is much
> better on Windows than previous versions (if you're into that).

If I remember correctly it's the installation of PortAudio itself on
Windows.  Last time I tried (which is last year) I could not get
PortAudio to build.  It had something to do with some
MingW/cygwin/Visual C++ business and I couldn't find any clear and
definite instructions.  I have to admit that I didn't try hard enough
and I moved on to other things.  I use Mac for development myself, but
a large number of users out there will be using Windows.  In my
opinion, if something cannot be easily installed within 3 steps, we
got a problem and we need to fix it.

Eric