I started the month with some preparational work for the 2nd GSoc task - to use GstEncodeBin for recording. The first change was to streamline the recording UI. Instead of two dialog - one for setting and one for the progress - we now just show one. This causes less noise on the screen and avoids us some data passing. I also added a bunch of unit tests for sink bin to provide a means to check for regressions when switching the implementation. This also uncovered some
unimplemented code path on the gstreamer side. Those are now fixed or handled on our side.
In the mid of the month I could merge the encodebin transition. It is a very decent code simplification (68 insertions(+), 113 deletions(-)). Adding new output formats is a piece of cake now. And as a bonus, the code is now platform independent - instead of specifying the explicit elements to use, we now specify the container and audio track format. This way encodebin would pick suitable elements depending on what is available.
After the audiosynth baseclass was added, I wanted to see how well it works and started with a long time todo - a c64 sid synthesizer plugin. This wraps the rsid library - an awesome cycle based sid emulation. The library API is quite simple; basically:
init(); update(regs[29]); clock(*buffer, num_samples); release();
I was really happy to also see a lot of technical information about the sid chip available on the net. When designing the gstreamer element API one needs to have a little understanding how the chip is use to still provide a convenient access to the parameters, but now hide important modes. That needs a bit of experiments to decide whether individual bits need to be exposed or only certain combinations make sense. In addition I implemented a couple of the typical effects. The normal timing resolution of a tracker song is not too high and thus one needs support from the element to provide things like arpeggio, portamento and vibrato.
The sidsyn is the first more complex audio synth we have in buzztard. It is also the first one that uses more of the gst-buzztard API. This was a good opportunity to review and cleanup the APIs a bit. With those cleanups I also killed the help interface, as new enough gstreamer has the required feature on the element metadata side and the feature is not crucial any way.
This month I skip the git stats, as I took the indent git commit hook into use and reformatted the buzztard code base. Voilà: buzztard - now with whitespace!