Previously, a libc-like out-of-line error information was used in the
loader and its plugins. Now, all functions that may fail to do their job
return some sort of Result. The universally-used error type ist the new
LoaderError, which can contain information about the general error
category (such as file format, I/O, unimplemented features), an error
description, and location information, such as file index or sample
index.
Additionally, the loader plugins try to do as little work as possible in
their constructors. Right after being constructed, a user should call
initialize() and check the errors returned from there. (This is done
transparently by Loader itself.) If a constructor caused an error, the
call to initialize should check and return it immediately.
This opportunity was used to rework a lot of the internal error
propagation in both loader classes, especially FlacLoader. Therefore, a
couple of other refactorings may have sneaked in as well.
The adoption of LibAudio users is minimal. Piano's adoption is not
important, as the code will receive major refactoring in the near future
anyways. SoundPlayer's adoption is also less important, as changes to
refactor it are in the works as well. aplay's adoption is the best and
may serve as an example for other users. It also includes new buffering
behavior.
Buffer also gets some attention, making it OOM-safe and thereby also
propagating its errors to the user.
All audio applications (aplay, Piano, Sound Player) respect the ability
of the system to have theoretically any sample rate. Therefore, they
resample their own audio into the system sample rate.
LibAudio previously had its loaders resample their own audio, even
though they expose their sample rate. This is now changed. The loaders
output audio data in their file's sample rate, which the user has to
query and resample appropriately. Resampling code from Buffer, WavLoader
and FlacLoader is removed.
Note that these applications only check the sample rate at startup,
which is reasonable (the user has to restart applications when changing
the sample rate). Fully dynamic adaptation could both lead to errors and
will require another IPC interface. This seems to be enough for now.
This commit addresses two issues:
1. If you play a 96 KHz Wave file, the slider position is incorrect,
because it is assumed all files are 44.1 KHz.
2. For high-bitrate files, there are audio dropouts due to not
buffering enough audio data.
Issue 1 is addressed by scaling the number of played samples by the
ratio between the source and destination sample rates.
Issue 2 is addressed by buffering a certain number of milliseconds
worth of audio data (instead of a fixed number of bytes).
This makes the the buffer size independent of the source sample rate.
Some of the code is redesigned to be simpler. The code that did the
book-keeping of which buffers need to be loaded and which have been
already played has been removed. Instead, we enqueue a new buffer based
on a low watermark of samples remaining in the audio server queue.
Other small fixes include:
1. Disable the stop button when playback is finished.
2. Remove hard-coded instances of 44100.
3. Update the GUI every 50 ms (was 100), which improves visualizations.
SPDX License Identifiers are a more compact / standardized
way of representing file license information.
See: https://spdx.dev/resources/use/#identifiers
This was done with the `ambr` search and replace tool.
ambr --no-parent-ignore --key-from-file --rep-from-file key.txt rep.txt *
