[sdiy] Radfio Shack

[Paul Higgins]

On Thursday, October 21, 2004, at 10:31 AM, Richard Wentk wrote:

> There are very few *hardware* projects because most of the people who 
> are interested in music DSP code VST and Direct X plugins instead of 
> building things with a soldering iron. One problem is there's a huge 
> gap between the neat and tidy world of code and the hands-on world of 
> solder flux, and there's no easy path between the two. PC and Mac 
> architectures are both closed and trying to do something like making 
> your own USB or Firewire peripherals is a *major* project.
>
> I think if the architectures were more open, there would very possibly 
> be a lot more interest.

The Mac architecture is "closed"?  Not since OS X, I don't think.  
Maybe Apple won't give you all their hardware schematics (maybe they 
will, I have no idea), but something like 95% of OS X is open-source.  
It's basically FreeBSD.  IIRC the part that's closed is their window 
server and "Quartz" render engine.  And if you're developing USB or 
Firewire stuff, that's all outboard anyway.  (I would imagine that 
USB/Firewire hardware IS a huge DIY project, though).

By comparison, last I checked, a lot of the software APIs for writing 
DSP code are proprietary.  You can download the various companies' dev 
tools (VST etc.), but you'll get no help from them on what the code 
actually is.  In Linux, of course, everything is open-source, and 
people are always coming up with new plugins (check out those for the 
Audacity editor, for example, especially the "GVerb" plugin).

-PRH