The Amazing Audio Engine is here, and it’s open source and Audiobus-ready

Taae

I’m very pleased to announce that The Amazing Audio Engine has pulled into the station. It’s been a long time in the making, and there have been one or two minor distractions along the way, but I’m proud of the result:

A sophisticated and feature-packed but very developer-friendly audio engine, bringing you the very best iOS audio has to offer. We’re talking audio units, block or object-based creation and processing, filter chains, recording and monitoring anything, multichannel input support, brilliant lock-free synchronization and rich Audiobus support.

You’ll find The Engine, a bunch of documentation and the brand-new community forum at theamazingaudioengine.com

It’s also open source. And it’s ready for Audiobus.

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Thirteen Months of Audiobus

Tomorrow, Monday December 10, my friend and partner-in-crime Sebastian Dittmann and I are launching a project over twelve months in the making: Audiobus. We’re very proud of what we’ve managed to do, and we both firmly believe that Audiobus is going to fundamentally alter the way people create music on the iPad and iPhone.

You can find out more about Audiobus itself at audiob.us, but I wanted to take a moment to breathe, look back, and explain why the hell I’ve been so quiet over the last year.

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Compiling Image Resources into a Static Library

I’ve recently been working on a static library for distribution to other developers — Audiobus — and I need to include a couple of graphical resources with the distribution. The usual solution to this is to include the resources separately in a bundle, and require the user to drop them in to their project along with the static library.

I thought I’d see if I could make the process just a little neater, and successfully devised a way to compile the images straight into the library, so the distribution remains nice and clean — just the library itself and a few header files.

Now, I can pop image resources into a folder, and after compiling, access them within the static library with:

UIImage *image = TPGetCompiledImage(@"Button.png");

It automatically handles “@2x” Retina images (although it doesn’t currently do “~ipad” versions).

Here’s how it’s done.

The magic is in a shell script which uses the xxd hex dump tool to create C code that represents the image data as a byte array, then creates around it a set of utilities to turn those arrays into UIImages on demand.

Along with it is a couple of template files — a header and implementation file — that describe the format of the derived code.

Finally, a little tweaking of the project in Xcode (with a brief foray into a text editor to work around some Xcode shortcomings) puts it all together.

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I ♥ Alfred: Code execution extensions

ExtensionI’m a really big fan of Alfred, and lately I’ve found it really useful for running tiny little snippets of code — whether it’s to quickly URL decode a string, or remind myself of how C integer-to-float conversion behaves, I find myself using these little extensions I put together quite frequently.

Here’re two workflows I use to run PHP code (one which just executes it and shows the result in Growl, and one which copies the result to the clipboard), and a workflow that runs a snippet of C code. Of course, it wouldn’t take much to make workflows for many other languages, too.

Alfred 2 workflows

Now with live results! Hit enter to copy result to clipboard.

Run C Code.alfredworkflow

Run PHP Code.alfredworkflow

Older, Alfred 1 extensions:

Execute PHP Code.alfredextension

Execute PHP Code, Copy Result.alfredextension

Run C code.alfredextension

Screen Shot 2013 03 25 at 11 25 11

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Avoiding duplicate symbol issues when using common utilities within a static library

Screen Shot 2012 04 15 at 14 03 28I’m working on two projects right now that have static library products, to be given to other developers to use in their projects: Audiobus and The Amazing Audio Engine. In both cases, I’m making quite heavy use of my circular buffer code, TPCircularBuffer, which would result in duplicate symbol errors if the static library were linked with another project that used it.

In case the solution was useful to others, here’s how I worked around it: Use the preprocessor to rename the symbols automatically during the build phase.

This is done by adding a series of -DOldSymbol=NewSymbol flags to the ‘Other C Flags’ build setting – like -DTPCircularBuffer=ABCircularBuffer, for instance.

No more symbol conflicts.

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An Xcode 4 template to create universal static libraries

I’ve created an Xcode 4 project template to create universal (armv6, armv7 and simulator) static libraries for iOS, based on Adam Martin’s script:

iOS-Universal-Library-Template

The existing static library template provided with Xcode only builds one architecture, which is not particularly suitable for distribution. A number of people have created scripts to create universal libraries, which require some mucking around with Xcode target settings to use.

This template draws on this work to provide all that is required to produce universal libraries – just select the ‘Universal Static Library’ type in the New Project/New Target dialog, and you’re all set.

Universal static library

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