[gst-devel] float caps

[Steve Baker]

On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 04:21, Benjamin Otte wrote:
> And as far as I can see in our current elements, noone needs multiple
> pads. I just saw that float2int and alsasink are a hell of a lot more
> complicated then they need to be just because of float.
> So my questions are:
> - Why was that design decision made and is there any reason to keep using
> it?
> - If not and we designed a new float format, how should data in it be
> represented? What are the requirements?
> - Who is using float audio atm?

The mono float format is used for pro-audio. If you want to see the
technical justifications for the format then read through the LAD
archives (sorry I can't be more specific right now).
(http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/archive.php3)

Because we wanted to encourage developers to stick to this convention
the float format was only given one channel and int2float always
deinterleaves.

Until now there were no practical uses for consumer audio using floats -
it seems that now there is.

I think the best thing might be to make the number of channels unlimited
for float format, and change audioconvert to handle the int/float
conversion. This would leave float2int/int2float untouched to do their
specialised functions.

cheers
-- 
Steve Baker <steve at stevebaker.org>