Presenting The Amazing Audio Engine 2: a new audio engine for Core Audio. In this video I introduce the main concepts, and walk through creating a simple demo app that plays a loop with effects, mixed together with audio input, with recording capabilities.
Find TAAE 2 at theamazingaudioengine.com, or on GitHub.
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.
Huzzah! I’m announcing a new project which will be launching over the next couple of months.
It’s called The Amazing Audio Engine, and it represents the product of years of experience with iOS audio. It’s a sophisticated iOS audio engine that lets developers skip the Core Audio learning curve, and get on with writing great software.
The tech behind this is what drives Loopy and Loopy HD, as well as the in-development Audiobus app.
Subscribe at theamazingaudioengine.com to be kept in the loop as it approaches launch time.
Some of the features:
I’ve recently made some updates to TPCircularBuffer (on GitHub), my C circular/ring buffer implementation, which add a memory barrier on read and write, inline the main functions for a potential performance boost, and add support for use within C++ projects.
If you’re using TPCircularBuffer at all, I recommend updating!
I’ve just updated my C circular buffer implementation, adopting the trick originally proposed by Philip Howard and adapted to Darwin by Kurt Revis: A virtual copy of the buffer is inserted directly after the end of the buffer, so that you can write past the end of the buffer, but have your writes automatically wrapped around to the start — no need to manually implement buffer wrapping logic.
This dramatically simplifies the use of a circular buffer — you can use chunks of the buffer without any need to worry about where the wrap point is.
See the new implementation, which is thread-safe with one consumer and one producer, with no need for locks, making it perfect for use with high-priority Core Audio threads, on GitHub: TPCircularBuffer.
There’s a basic example of its use over on the original post.
A headache-inducing scenario: I’m working on a view controller, and I realise that in order to support landscape and portrait modes, I’m going to need to provide two different layouts.
So, I create two different views within the nib, one portrait, one landscape, each with the same view hierarchy, but with a different layout.
When the orientation changes, I set self.view to the appropriate view. I initialise both views on load, and keep both of them synced to properly reflect the app’s state — basically, I’m double-handling everything, which bloats my code and increases the chance I’ll make a mistake.
So, here’s an easier way: Rather than maintaining two separate view hierarchies and switching between them when the orientation changes, why not just change the layout of one single view hierarchy? The only changes between the portrait and landscape views are layout changes, so if we can extract just the layout information from each view, then we don’t have to worry about maintaining both view hierarchies.
Basically, we’re talking about using each view version as a layout template only.
That’s what TPMultiLayoutViewController class does. It’s a drop-in UIViewController subclass that automatically manages switching between different view layouts for portrait and landscape orientations, without the need to maintain view state across two different view hierarchies.
It works by defining portraitView and landscapeView outlets which it traverses upon loading the nib. It matches each subview element to its counterpart in the other layout (based on tag, target/action, title, etc.), and stores just the layout attributes of each element.
Then, when the orientation changes, the view hierarchy is traversed and these layouts are applied to each subview.
To use it,
TPMultiLayoutViewController.Grab it from the TPMultiLayoutViewController GitHub repository, and let me know what you think.
The Amazing Audio Engine 2 Sample App demo
Here’s a demo of the TAAE2 sample app – full source code with The Amazing Audio Engine 2.