Edgar Varese Guest Professor, Winter 2008/2009

This seminar will cover some of the low level details involved in implementing a digital audio workstation (such as Ardour), but potentially applicable to any moderately complex audio software. We will examine some or all of: basic audio I/O, MVC design, multithreading and the use of parallelism, realtime and lock free programming techniques, filesystem design and use questions, questions about time and timekeeping, undo/redo, and various abstractions commonly used in this sort of program. Attendees will find themselves more able to understand and contribute to real-world audio software. Our focus will be software architecture rather than signal processing. Seminar topics week-by-week:

1. Introduction, Basic Computer Architecture
2. Audio I/O
3. Threads & Parallelism I: using threads
4. Threads & Parallelism II: lock free programming
5. Threads & Parallelism III: parallel algorithms for audio
6. Frank Schultz/Generalized Dynamics Plugin + Timing 1: timelines, plugin latency compensation
7. Timing 2: sample clocks, system clocks, DLL's, the concept of "now"
8. Control Data; Model-View-Controller Design
9. A Tourist's Guide to Ardour Data Structures
10. Disks, Filesystems and Disk I/O
11. Graphical User Interface: interactions, design considerations