[bmedina]

I've heard conflicting reports about the performance of visual plugins in Audion. When I tested out G-Force within Audion, the reported framerate was significantly lower than within SoundJam. This would make sense, as I assume the Audion programmers just reverse-engineered SoundJam's plugin implementation and suffered a performance penalty as a result. Hopefully this will be cleaned up in the future, but I've heard posts saying that the performance now is pretty much the same in both apps. Any comments?

[This message has been edited by bmedina (edited 12-22-2000).]

BMedina,

We didn't have to reverse engineer SoundJam's visuals API -- it was a published format. We chose to support it to save the visual plugin authors the pain of having to rewrite their applications for a whole new API.

As for a performance hit, our testing shows that it's just as good as any other player. Of course, visuals will be much smoother when the visuals window is in the forground and getting more CPU time from the Mac OS. (Bring on X already!) But then, why would you want visuals in the background? They're for show, right?

Of course, encoding, the equalizer, etc. can all slow down the visuals as they all require CPU time as well.

Since this is our first "round" of visuals work -- we added it after much hesitation -- we'll continue to fine tune and improve it in the future.

-Cabel / Panic