Re: NSSound

[David Chisnall]

On 5 Jun 2009, at 16:45, Xavier Glattard wrote:

> Stefan Bidigaray a écrit :
> > On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 3:29 AM, Xavier Glattard <address@hidden 
> >  <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
> >    24-bits audio becomes very common.
>
> What i mean is that most (all?) sound cards are now 24-bits / 96kHz.  
> Even the old Audigy can do that.

I didn't reply to this earlier, but I think NSSound should be very  
wary of making any assumptions about the native sound format for the  
hardware for several reasons:

1) Expensive hardware now uses floating-point samples internally, and  
this is likely to become the case for cheap hardware in the future.
2) Handheld devices and telephony systems often use lower quality  
sound (even 8-bit or 22KHz) for speaker output.
3) A lot of sound hardware can do format conversion in the DSP, which  
uses less power than doing it on the CPU and doesn't take CPU time  
from other programs.
4) Any half-decent OS hides these details from you.

David