Open questions

The following is a preliminary list of open questions, which were addressed either cursorily or not at all in the ADC presentation.

Low-latency monitor mixes should ideally be computed on the server-side. This is discussed further under "future work" below.

Interactive/animated GUI visualizations, e.g., Serum's animated waveform, filter and envelope graphs, can be handled in either of two ways (or even a hybrid of both):

1. All computation can be done within the GUI code
2. Or, if a lot of CPU power is required, the network protocol should be extended to allow the server-side DSP code to compute and return a block of data which can be used to drive the display.

BPM tracking is probably a matter of including track-position data (bar/beat/fraction) in the header for each audio buffer, but others with experience in this area may have other ideas.

There are also many non-technical questions which relate more to the notion of future market opportunities. For example, during the talk I suggested several scenarios where large plug-in vendors might create their own custom-configured server products, but what about the smaller boutique vendors who drive so much of the innovation in this industry? Would any company come forward with a generic server product, which could run DSP modules from any plug-in vendor? I believe that this could only happen in the wake of a satisfactory standardization effort.

Future work

In the near-future continuation of the work presented at ADC, I hope to address the following:

• Refining the communication protocol to allow for a standardized core set of message formats with the option to extend to specialized/proprietary messages as necessary.
• Refining the protocol to improve robustness in the face of network congestion, delays, and errors (e.g. severed cables).
• Generalizing the communication aspects of the DSPServer and DSPClient classes to embrace multiple stream-oriented transport options, including UDP network sockets, standard USB endpoint data streams, fiber-optic options, and specialized digital interconnects which are already established in the pro-audio industry.
• Server-side FX chaining, as well as more general flow-graph (aka "node based") data-flow options.
• Server-side load balancing and service discovery (i.e., no hard-coded IP addresses/ports).