[gmpi] Re: Back to work: 7.1.3

>
>  c) No.  Encodings are decoded when entering the GMPI graph.  LtRt is
>     turned into 4 mono streams.
>
>  d)  Other. Explain.
>

GMPI only needs to support encodings that people will apply processing to.  I'm 
not an expert on LtRt but I doubt it could be processed much without munging 
the phase information. This, in my mind, makes it a "delivery" medium and GMPI 
plugins don't need to handle it.

A list of GMPI-native formats might be:

1) integer, fixed point, and floating point PCM at any bit depth & sample rate
2) complex (frequency-domain) bins of any width & sample rate
3) DSD data (?)

Each plugin should publish a prioritized list of the data types they can send 
and receive (including "this format is not handled" which means the conversion 
must happen in the host)  A professional-level plugin might natively handle all 
of these cases, while a newbie project might only handle one.  This allows the 
host to choose an optimum format when connecting two plugins.  (i.e. if you 
string 4 plugins in series, and they do all their processing in the frequency 
domain, why not let the FFT format be preserved in between them?)

I think GMPI should include a codec API, like Translators in BeOS, that provide 
the mechanism (not necessarily the implementation) for converting to/from any 
of the native formats.  These codecs could then be extended in the host to 
encode/decode "delivery" formats such as mp3, Dolby, etc.

Note that this does NOT address the problem of supporting multi-channel 
plugins.  We still need a mechanism for telling a plugin "these four mono 
streams are the 4 outputs of a LtRt mix" (or do we?  Is it good enough to 
transparently allocate 4 of the same mono plugin when you operate on a 4-wide 
stream? Only the panner/mux/mixdown plugins really need to be aware of 
multichannel formats, and these could be hand-wired by the user)

Sorry for the stream-of-consciousness format, I'm still waking up.

-Ben

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