A distributed computer system for professional audio

  • Authors:
  • D. Anderson;R. Doris;J. Moorer

  • Affiliations:
  • Sonic Solutions, 1891 E. Francisco Blvd., San Rafael, CA;Sonic Solutions, 1891 E. Francisco Blvd., San Rafael, CA;Sonic Solutions, 1891 E. Francisco Blvd., San Rafael, CA

  • Venue:
  • MULTIMEDIA '94 Proceedings of the second ACM international conference on Multimedia
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

In professional audio, the transition from analog to digital technology is nearly complete. The more recent shift towards systems based on general-purpose computers has been gradual, because such computers lack the processing and I/O performance needed for professional audio applications. The SonicSystem, a professional digital audio system, solves these problems using DSPs and a specialized file system. We describe the uses and implementation of the SonicSystem.A distributed version of the SonicSystem, using FDDI networking, was released in 1992. It provides transparent real-time access to remote sound files, and can handle 100 or more CD-rate channels simultaneously. The system provides guaranteed performance: an activity (such as playing a sound file) is permitted to start only if it can be assured of completing with no dropouts. These properties are achieved by the use of a special-purpose transport protocol, real-time scheduling, and resource reservation.