I am actually working on a similar project, using multiple computers to do spatialization across large areas. I have done some sound installations in a 800m tunnel, so using one computer with long audio wires wasn't really feasible, especially considering my budget and the fact that I got ~15 computers and lots of CAT5 ethernet cable donated to me.
First off, don't put audio files into a database, only references to the files. Almost all databases are heavily optimized to handle small bits of text info, so they don't do so well with large hunks of binary data like audio files.
As for distributing them, how you do it would depend quite a bit on what resources you have available and how often the samples are going to be accessed, and the amount of time between when the file is written and when its played. Also, the kind of network they are on is important.
- rsync is efficient making mirrors of directories that don't change
too often (like hourly or daily). You could have each physical installation have a mirror of all of the sound files, and then stream the control data to a Pd patch on each machine.
- If its a local network, you could samba or NFS share and have the
sound files written directly to that share. This could work over the internet too, using tunneling or opening ports in any firewalls. You could either stream the result back as audio, or send control data to a pd patch which reads the files over samba/nfs.
I am going the samba/stream control data route with my installation, but that could change based on performance. I recommend a SCSI disk if you are going to have numerous machines reading/writing to the server.
.hc
On Monday, Oct 6, 2003, at 22:54 America/New_York, ben@ekran.org wrote:
Hey all,
I'll be soon starting a project that will use a large database of audio clips (potencially days worth or more). I would like to use PD to impliment the system and wanted to know if anyone has done similar projects.
There is going to be a physical installation where people can record audio. This audio will then get transferred (via ftp script driven from PD?) to a central server. Another PD session (running on/near the server) will read these clips from the database and stream them to the PD session running in the physical installation.
There may be multiple physical installations, all getting the same audio stream from the server.
Is there any elegant way to transfer the audio recordings directly from PD to the server? I think streaming it would be too complicated, since there would need to be multiple clients sending audio to the server at different times.
There also may be a web component. Is it possible to stream audio from a flash client to the PD server? (or connect the flash Com server with PD?)
Anyone any experiences and suggestions would be great.
Thanks Ben
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