We develop a commercial piece of software in LabVIEW which needs to do extensive sound output and input (professional internal and external soundcards, up to 16 channels, numerous bit depths and sampling rates with low latencies). This software is around 16 years old and when the project began there was not much in the way of standard libraries for sound I/O so we wrote a custom dll for doing windows API calls that we call from LabVIEW.
However, we are now interested in porting our software to Mac, Windows-64, and also supporting a pro-audio driver format (ASIO) in addition to the standard Windows WDM/MME drivers (in fact, we have already implemented a somewhat buggy interface for ASIO).
We would like to find a single technology that we could drop into our LabVIEW application to access soundcards on Win-32, Win-64, and Mac, additionally, if it supports ASIO on Windows that would be great.
The obvious and easiest place to look is the the built in LabVIEW VI's for doing Sound I/O, but, in talking with another company doing similar work, it appears that those VI's don't work nearly well enough (at least on Mac) for our needs.
A LabVIEW Mac user wrote to us:
"There are two sets of VI's for sound management in labview for Mac
- an old one, pretty limited but working, we are limited to 2 channels in and 2 out
- A new one which is supposed to give access to more parameters (choice of the sound input /output), better resolution ...) but unfortunately ... it doesn't work since few years ! External sound cards are not recognized and informations about the input and output are wrong
-I had some mail discussion last year for this bugs in LV 2010 with somebody of NI, and they are aware of the problem."
So, we are interested in finding a crossplatform sound I/O framework that could be called directly from LabVIEW, allowing us to create a cross platform, multichannel, multisoundcard, multisampling rate, LabVIEW sound interface.
Does anyone know of such a framework? In doing a little research I came accross a few, but I have no experience with them and whether they would fullfill our needs and could be utilized directly from LabVIEW without having to create wrappers for each target. Anyone have more perspective?
PortAudio appears to be an audio library designed for software that needs to be ported http://www.portaudio.com/
Fmod appears to be a commercial cross-platform API for sound: http://www.fmod.org/index.php/products
OpenAL is basically the sound version of OpenGL http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/default.aspx
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