32 bit audio on Windows? - audio

I would like to play 32 bit audio from my computer. Is this possible? I know about "AL_EXT_FLOAT32" extension, but does any hardware/windows even support this? And if there is support for it, will it just be reconverted and played as 16 bit audio?
Is it possible to play 32 bit audio from a PC with consumer hardware?

As far as I'm aware, most consumer hardware only supports 16-bit audio output. Some of the premium sound devices sometimes support up to 24-bit. Most digital audio systems support 16 and 24-bit PCM steams. I have not seen consumer devices which support 32-bit PCM.
Most likely windows will just scale it down or, with some devices, will crash the sound driver (remember some Sound-Blasters on XP).
Many music formats can be stored in (normalized) 32-bit floats, and will quite possibly be processed by OpenAL or Operating system's audio mixer in 32-bit floats. The mixer then sends the data to the driver, which is usually 16-bit.
I don't know OpenAL, but I think that format is about the input audio format (or the internal mixer?), not the audio output it will produce?
That, or it supports high-end professional equipment?

Related

Is it realistic to stream 12-16 bit audio through SPP bluetooth in realtime?

I have tried to send 12-bit audio to be listened to in real time through the HC05 SPP bluetooth module hooked up to an arduino and DAC over serial with a python RFCOMM socket. I have since learned that Serial Port Protocol is not very great at all for this purpose due to its low bandwidth. I figured I could definitely send the data and then play it out through a DAC, but I doubt an arduino would hold an array the size of a WAV file and maybe not even an mp3 file, but that would defeat the purpose of controlling the audio (play,pause,rewind,etc) from my computer. Would it be more realistic and worthwhile to use an A2DP enabled bluetooth module? Or is it still possible to listen to acceptable quality 12-16 bit audio in real time with SPP? I have tried to use lower bit songs, adjusted baud rates for the arduino and HC-05 serial ports, and tried to adjust the magnitude of the values outputted by the DAC to the audio port and I still seem to get crackly audio. It seems the problem comes down to the low bitrate transfer speed of SPP, or am I wrong?
Is it realistic to stream 12-16 bit audio through SPP bluetooth in realtime?
Sure, at some awfully slow sample rate <= 8 kHz. You'd be better off sending 8-bit audio at a higher sample rate.
Would it be more realistic and worthwhile to use an A2DP enabled bluetooth module?
Yes, absolutely, without question. That's what it's designed for, as I mentioned in your other question.
Or is it still possible to listen to acceptable quality 12-16 bit audio in real time with SPP?
Acceptable is subjective. If it's just voice, you can get away with it. If you want reasonable audio quality for music, almost universally, no, it's not acceptable.
It seems the problem comes down to the low bitrate transfer speed of SPP, or am I wrong?
Without any code to inspect and debug, it's impossible to say what the specific problem is that you're referring to. Undoubtedly, the low bandwidth will not enable good quality audio anyway.
If you must continue to use SPP and simple codecs like PCM, at least use differential PCM to save a bit more bandwidth.

How to convert PCM audio stream for online play

I have access to an audio stream of PCM audio buffers. I should be clear I do not have access to the audio file. I only have access to a stream of 4096 byte chunks of the audio data.
The PCM buffers come in with the following format:
PCM Int 16
Little Endian
Two Channels
Interleaved
To support audio playback on a standard browser I need to convert the audio to the following format:
PCM Float 32
Big Endian
Two channels (at most)
Deinterleaved
This audio is coming from an iOS app so I have access to Swift and Objective C (although I am not very comfortable with Objective C...which makes Apple's Audio Converter Services almost impossible to use because Swift really doesn't like pointers).
Additionally the playback will occur on a browser so I could handle the conversion in client side Javascript or server sider. I am proficient enough in the following server side languages to do a conversion:
Java (preferred)
PHP
Node.js
Python
If anyone knows a way to do this in any of these languages please let me know. I have worked on this for long enough that I will probably understand even a very technical description of how to do this.
My current plan is to use bitwise operations to deinterleave the left and right channels, then cast the Int 16 Buffer to a Float 32 Buffer with the Web Audio API. Does this seem like a good plan?
Any help is appreciated, thank you.
My current plan is to use bitwise operations to deinterleave the left and right channels, then cast the Int 16 Buffer to a Float 32 Buffer with the Web Audio API. Does this seem like a good plan?
Yes, that is exactly what you need to do. I do the exact same thing in my applications, and this method works well and is really the only way that makes sense to do it. You don't want to send 32-bit float samples to the client from the server due to the amount of bandwidth. Do the conversion client-side.

Recording wav file Using Arduino

I am bit stuck, how can I make my arduino record into .wav files?
The arduino is connected with a microphone, and am using the Arduino ADC.
Any ideas? Will I be able to play them back using my pc?
many question cross my head
1- Is this possible using an arduino Uno
2- Is this possile using just a microphone connected to the Arduino ADC
3- if yes how can i get the wav format.
The idea gonna be like this
Ardiuno microphone-->Uno ADC -->arduino (library making wav sound)--> Storing data to a an SD card connected via SPI or maybe (connecting a Raspberry as a storage device)
also another question:
4- Do I need an amplifier due to the act that analog output from the microphone is very weak so the ADC couldn't detect the variation
In another log i had seen that i should connect the microphone to a level shifter.And that cause of the analog output is AC so i have to make the negative wave as 0 (for 10 it ADC)
the zero point as 512 and the positive as 1024 (10 bit ADC).(really i'm not sure about this part)
doing some research i got this library "https://github.com/TMRh20/TMRpcm/wiki/Advanced-Features#recording-audio" which is supposed to do the job, I mean making some wav file from the analog input.
So any help would be appreciated
Thx in advance,
Salah Laaroussi
Yes, although a bit complex it is very possible to do this via an uno.
The biggest hurdles to overcome is the limited amount of RAM and the clock speed. You will have to setup twin buffers to handle writing to the SD card. Make sure the card has a high enough write speed or the entire program will come to a screeching halt as you will run out of memory.
apc mag has a great article detailing out the circuit and code.
http://apcmag.com/arduino-projects-digital-audio-recorder.htm/
There are many things you haven't prepared yet:
output of microphone (assuming you know about electronics: still requires a biasing circuit e.g. a resistor + capacitor).
the output of the microphone is still very weak (in the magnitude of mV), which Arduino is incapable of capturing so you need a pre-amplifier
the design of the pre-amplifier will also include DC offset which makes the output of the microphone all above 0VDC which is in the range of the Arduino ADC otherwise the arduino will capture only those above 0VDC.

I hear clicking in audio with a DirectShow graph created with Graph Edit yet player software on my PC plays audio smoothly

I have a DirectShow application that I built with Delphi 6 using the DSPACK component library. For two days I have been trying to solve a problem with audio playback. When I run the filter graph I create I hear repetitive clicks in the playback. What was really confusing was that the audio file I created simultaneously with my filter graph had clean continuous audio, not gaps. So I knew that the audio buffers were being delivered properly but something I was doing was "jamming up" the "live" playback. Or so I thought. I spent two days diagnosing the problem looking for semaphores being held too long (locks) or perhaps timestamp problems, which I documented in this other Stack Overflow post:
Getting stuttering during rendering of my DirectShow filter despite output file being "smooth"
A few minutes ago I decided to try a test with the Graph Edit utility. I created a dead simple graph consisting of just the capture device I was using (VOIP phone microphone), and the renderer device I was using (HD ATI Rear Audio output to headphones). Two filters total. Much to my surprise I heard the same clicking. So here was a case that did not involve my code at all and I heard clicking.
Then I changed the audio renderer in the Graph Edit created filter graph to the VOIP phone ear piece. The clicking went away.
Now I know there's a way to get smooth audio on ut the ATI Rear Audio device since its the preferred audio output device and everything from videos I play on my PC to wave files I play on it sound flawless. So are the other software programs doing something different than just connecting filters? I am wondering if perhaps the default mode for the HD ATI Rear Audio is without double-buffering and perhaps those other software programs know how to enable that feature? Or are they doing something else, perhaps using another DirectShow or DirectSound filter or technique for example, to make the audio play smoothly on the HD ATI Rear Audio renderer?
What you possibly having (depends on actual stuttering though) is that when you are using capture and playback devices backed by different hardware, their sampling rates slightly differ. For example, you capture 22050 Hz at actual rate of (22050 - 2%) Hz and you play it back with hardware consuming bytes at (22050 + 2%) Hz.
Now obviously this won't work out smooth: eventually playback will experience data underlow... If you save into file and play back from file, it will go smooth as the file will be able to supply data at the rate of playback device. If capture and playback devices are the same hardware, they are likely to use shared "hardware" clock and rates match.
The problem is known as "rate matcing" and is discussed on MSDN in Live Sources section.

Can v4l2 be used to read audio and video from the same device?

I have a capture card that captures SDI video with embedded audio. I have source code for a Linux driver, which I am trying to enhance to add video4linux2 support. My changes are based on the vivi example.
The problem I've come up against is that all the example I can find deal with only video or only audio. Even on the client side, everything seems to assume v4l is just video, like ffmpeg's libavdevice.
Do I need to have my driver create two separate devices, a v4l2 device and an alsa device? It seems like this makes the job of keeping audio and video in sync much more difficult.
I would prefer some way for each buffer passed between the driver and the app (through v4l2's mmap interface) contain a frame, plus some audio that matches up (with respect to time) with that frame.
Or perhaps have each buffer contain a flag indicating if it is a video frame, or a chunk of audio. Then the time stamps on the buffers could be used to sync things up.
But I don't see a way to do this with the V4L2 API spec, nor do I see any examples of v4l2-enabled apps (gstreamer, ffmpeg, transcode, etc) reading both audio and video from a single device.
Generally, the audio capture part of a device shows up as a separate device. It's usually a different physical device (posibly sharing a card), which makes sense. I'm not sure how much help that is, but it's how all of the software I'm familiar with works...
There are some spare or reserved fields in the v4l2 buffers that can be used to pass audio or other data from the driver to the calling application via pointers to mmaped buffers.
I modified the BT8x8 driver to use this approach to pass data from an A/D card synchronized to the video on Ubuntu 6.06.
It worked OK, but the effort of maintaining my modified driver caused me to abandon this approach.
If you are still interested I could dig out the details.
IF you want your driver to play with gstreamer etc. a separate audio device generally is what is expected.
Most of the cheap v4l2 capture card's audio is only an analog pass through with a volume control requiring a jumper to capture the audio via the sound card's line input.

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