Re: [ecasound] ecasound and lua?

On Thu, Jul 08, 2010 at 03:47:06PM +0200, Philipp wrote:
> Hi,
> I was wondering whether someone has experience with a combination of
> ecasound and lua.
>
> The idea is to write something like a simple DAW with ecasound as
> backend, some widget toolkit as frontend and lua as glue in between.
>
> The reasons for this are manyfold.
> I want something reliable that has the features I need for my own
> simple recording purposes. I also want to learn lua, a language which
> has a strange appeal to me. And I want to learn how to do UI
> programming, there are so many bad examples out there, there has to be a
> way to do it right.

Hi Philipp,

Sounds like an interesting project. A list at
http://home.pacbell.net/atai/guitool/
has a number of bindings for Lua. Here's the
list, minus links:

    * lua-gtk and lua-gnome, Lua's gtk+ and GNOME bindings
    * lua-FLTK, Lua FLTK binding
    * wxLua, WxWindows binding for Lua
    * tkLua, tk binding
    * IUP (Portable User Interface), a highly portable toolkit
      for Lua and C, for Windows and X11/Motif.

I used Tk for Nama. Easy to start with, cool in its day,
irredeemably ugly to many.

I took a look at WxWindows, as least a "hello world"
example or two. It's beautiful, and has a significant
learning curve.

GTK is very full featured.

Be aware that mastering any of these toolkits is a
significant life investment! (Well, I believe so, not having
actually mastered one myself :-)

I believe the right way to learn GUI programming is to make
some mistakes. ;-)

For the Ecasound interface, it is relatively easy
to run Ecasound in server mode, and then handle
IO to the process via a TCP/IP socket.

    ecasound -K --server

The -K flag keeps the process alive indefinitely.
For debugging you might like to start Ecasound as:

    ecasound -c --server

This way you can poke around inside Ecasound using
Ecasound's command line as well as your Lua/Net-ECI
interface.

If you add the -ddd flag, you'll get full diagnostics.

You can find all you need about Net-ECI in the Ecasound docs.
I'll also be glad to send you sample code (in Perl ;-)
for sending commands and reading results from
an Ecasound process.

btw, Nama is now available as a Debian package, so
if you get a hankering to fool around with it,
'apt-get install nama' (or 'aptitude nama')
should work.

Regards,

Joel

> As you can guess from the heavy use of the word 'learn' I'm not really
> experienced when it comes to programming, I learned some java
> programming in school and had a little look at a number of languages,
> but I'm pretty much a beginner.
>
> What I'm looking for are hints on where to start,
> thanks.
> --
> Regards,
> Philipp
>
> --
> "Wir stehen selbst enttäuscht und sehn betroffen / Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen." Bertolt Brecht, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan
>
>
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-- 
Joel Roth
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