Cantabile Development Blog

New Look Frame

So far, the work I've done on SkinLib has concentrated on the main content of the window. For the last couple of days I've been working on a new look for Cantabile's main window frame - including rounded corners, custom caption bar and new look status bar.

Also, I'm considering licensing the user-interface from the new Microsoft Office 2007 (also called Fluent). I've been through its 120 page specification but need to decide just how applicable it is to Cantabile.

On the audio engine, I've been thinking about other ways to utilize multiple processor support. The obvious and most beneficial way to do this is to run each rack on a separate thread so that plugins can be processed in parallel.

However there are other places where multiple CPUs can be leveraged. Besides processing plugins, most of the work done by the audio engine is mixing and converting audio samples. Since Cantabile is nearly always used with more than one audio channel, there's no reason the mixing of each channel can't be done in parallel.

To this end I've implemented some code that maintains a set of worker threads, accepts a set of work items, runs them all in parallel and returns when they're all finished. The question is whether the cost of the thread-switching and maintaining this mechanism is worth it.

Posted on April 21, 2007

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