[Soc-2011-dev] Weekly progress report #11 - 3D Audio

[neXyon]

1) what you did this week

I added a new speaker object type to do the 3D Audio animation (which is 
the main target), after discussions with Ton and Joshua we decided to 
set the start times of the sounds of those speakers in the NLA editor as 
NLA strips. I got this working by Tuesday, but it was a bit annoying 
having to add an Action just to be able to add an NLA strip, so Joshua 
is going to implement a special strip type for this reason and I'm 
waiting since Tuesday for this before I commit the actual playback 
functionality and record a video about it. ;-)

So meanwhile I went back to non-main tasks, including merging, bugfixes 
and lots of minor stuff.

One bigger thing I did was implementing Julius O. Smith's resampling 
algorithm which basically enables us to remove the dependency of 
libsamplerate, but I have to do some more intensive testing and create a 
better filter than I used so far.

The last two days I worked on a separate mixdown functionality which was 
quite exhausting due to the complexity of ffmpeg's API (have I ever said 
that I hate it?), just compare the ffmpeg writer to the sndfile one... 
But after all the mixdown functionality worked out just awesome, it lets 
you select everything in detail (container, codec, sampleformat) and 
only shows working/possible combinations (unlike the ffmpeg render 
output panel...), yay!

2) what you will do next week

Wait for Joshua to complete the special NLA strips and then commit the 
working speaker objects, also doing a demo video about it and thus 
finishing the main target of the project.

Apart from that I'll continue working on other tasks, like waveform 
display, improvements in several areas, resampling and maybe HRTFs if 
there's enough time.

3) any problems that will require extra attention and the impact on

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