[gst-devel] audio/raw = 16 bit int?

[Owen Fraser-Green]

Hi,

A quick question regarding audio/raw. I noticed sample resolution 
(MetaAudioRaw->bps) must be AFMT_S(8|16)_LE and audio data is passed as 
integers. Woudn't it be better for audio/raw to be 32-bit floats? By using 
16-bit signal processing, even (especially) if the output resolution is 16-
bit, aliasing effects can easily be introduced. It also means that there 
are currently a lot of "magic" numbers floating around (because the range 
is 0 to 2^16-1 instead of just -1 to 1) plus there's a lot of casting going 
on e.g. sinesrc and volume. 

I know it would mean an doubling the bandwidth of the audio streams but I 
feel that this would only be significant in long pipelines and then the 
extra dynamic range afforded by 32-bits would far outweigh that 
disadvantage.

Regards,
Owen

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Owen  Fraser-Green             "Hard work never killed anyone,
     owen at discobabe.net              but why give it a chance?"
---------------------------------------------------------------------------