Audio input on RISC OS

Because of my past as a developer of audio software and hardware, I was asked by Stefan Fröhling from the Cloverleaf RISC OS Project to have a look at how audio input on RISC OS could be achieved in the new age of hardware.

I have written my thoughts as to how I would go about it (and a bit of history). I hadn't realised how much had changed since the last time I looked at audio!

I hope I have everything right here; when I started, I didn't know about the additions, and had to rejig it a number of times before I thought I had everything down.

The primary goals are to:

1. Allow audio input
2. Support multiple interfaces at the same time
3. Have higher resolution formats
4. Provide backward compatibility with what has been done before

Update

There were a number of questions regarding SharedSound and why I've left it for another discussion. I've now written my thoughts on this, and also a few other things that had been raised.

Second update - API

The discussion got on to a new API. Having been Software Architect a few times at work, I've always seen both sides of API development. In some cases, you want to keep the old API for backward compatibility; but a new API would have advantages.

I decided to take an objective view as to whether a new API would be appropriate or not.

Source code

The source code as it currently stands is available from my Git repository, https://gitlab.tribbeck.com/riscos/soundsystem.git.

Binaries are also available from https://autobuild.tribbeck.com/SoundSystem/index.php, which also has the documentation within the zip file.

Development timescales

Unfortunately due to recent events, my work has been taking more of a priority than this - although I have taken the time to update some of my home infrastructure. This means that development is slow, and I'm only doing it in between work activities.

Hopefully the work will settle down soon, but I can't predict that...