[gst-devel] Distributed pipelines and modular synthesis ramble

[bucky at phantom.realshell.com]

Owen,

Judging from Erik's interview on linuxpower, distributed processing is
definitely in the works.  If you scroll down a bit, to the question about
scalability ("Christian: GStreamer is a framework for both sending..."),
the second paragraph is about pipelines that span multiple machines.  He
primarily discusses it from the perspective of a video render farm, but
audio shouldn't be any different.

David B.

On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Owen Fraser-Green wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm new to this list and in fact to gstreamer as a whole. I found my way 
> over here from Slashdot as I suddenly became convinced gstreamer offers the 
> best stream processing architecture I've seen on Linux so far. In 
> particular I like the seperation of filters from the sinks and sources.
> 
> One thing that occured to me was that there are two big benefits of such a 
> pipeline architecture one of which has been thoroughly explored, plugins, 
> but the other I havn't seen much mention of. That is the ability to 
> distribute components in the pipeline to a network of machines beyond a 
> simple client-server model.
> 
> The reason I see this as a useful feature is because, as far as I can tell, 
> the gstreamer architecture would lend itself perfectly to real-time modular 
> synthesis e.g. Reaktor ( http://www.native-
> instruments.de/english/2_products/1_reaktor/1_reaktor.html )whereby audio 
> signal generators (sources) are connected to a network of filters and out 
> through an audio channel (sink). One of the limitations I've found using 
> Reaktor extensively is that when I have a couple of synthesizers running 
> simultaneously alongside a sequencer, my machine practically freezes. I've 
> started thinking recently about the posibility of making a distributed 
> modular synthesizer so I can put the processor intensive parts on some 
> other machine(s) that doesn't affect the rest of the applications running.
> 
> In fact, maybe you guys are sitting on a revolution in music production as 
> a whole whereby the traversal of sound processing from dedicated hardware 
> to computer software could become complete with just a few PCs sitting 
> around the studio with gstreamer pipelines doing all the number crunching. 
> 
> Has this been brought up before? Would this be a viable application for 
> gstreamer? Or should I go back on the medication?
> 
> Regards,
> Owen
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>      Owen  Fraser-Green             "Hard work never killed anyone,
>      owen at discobabe.net              but why give it a chance?"
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
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