making apps, making webs.

Chrome Audio is worse than firefox, safari, and internet explorer Audio. There are cracks, pops, and sounds cut short.  It seems there's also not many sounds that can be played at once. Luckily I can use jquery.shitsound and soundmanager2 to prefer using flash audio over a javascript bridge.  This has a slight delay compared to firefox/safari html5 Audio, but is better than the built in chrome Audio.

rakarrack is a decent effects rack for linux. It's not packaged for ubuntu(of course), but is fairly easy to compile. I've been using the cvs version (yes, people are still quite happily using cvs it seems). Once you get it set up you have access to 80 presets of realtime guitar effects(2-40ms depending on your computer sound card setup). It works with the jack audio system, so you can route audio into it, and route its audio out to other programs easily enough. You can also control it with midi(alsa, or jack). Meaning you can hook it up to a midi controller of some sort. I've been using it with an maudio axiom 25 controller, and with python scripts via pygame.midi. It even has a very nice help manual integrated into the program... I wish more programs had a good help section. It details the 17 different effects that come with the program. One thing which is a bit funny is that it doesn't use LADSPA or lv2 plugins. You can of course still use these other plugi...

No I'm not talking about the free software song sung by Richard Stallman (very funny, but in a low quality .au format). Or the pronouciation of Linus and linux . To start on this long-journey-of-a-rambling-diatribe-of-words, there's two good audio patches in the SDL bug tracker for the upcoming SDL 1.2.14 release. One patch is for the pulse audio driver, and the other is for the alsa backend. These solve some of the high latency or scratchy sound issues some have. That's right a new SDL release very soon ... it's over a year since the last 1.2.13 release, and it seems like forever since the SDL 1.3 series begun. Most new development has been happening on the SDL 1.3 tree in the last year... so the 1.2 releases have slowed to an almost stop. There's a good article on a x-platform atomic operation API for SDL http://www.thegrumpyprogrammer.com/node/16 . That's one of the features that's been evolving over a few years, and is being implemented in svn. In py...