Qt's audio system has served us well, but it's a little limited moving forward. PortAudio is a mature and versatile library that will allow for better audio for users.
Features a lot of timeline-related cache optimizations as well as general
optimizations and improvements in timeline behavior. Should improve
usability significantly.
Previously the audio output manager was a "hybrid device" that acted as a pull
device for audio devices and as a push device and device proxy for the rest of
the application. This approach turned out to be flawed, particularly in the
frequent opening and closing of the audio device (extremely slow). Since we
use both pulling (for constant playback) and pushing (audio scrubbing, short
bursts of sound), it needed a similar but different approach. This approach
will switch the output device from push mode (default) to pull mode (during
playback) only when necessary resulting in far less UI lag (basically
unnoticeable now) than the previous approach.
Many changes were made throughout the codebase to support audio, these are
most of the small changes necessary.
The audio support still is not perfect. I still need to write in resampling
support. After that it should work correctly with all audio types.
Mike-Solar
itsmattkc