General Haiku Discussion

I was just wondering what the current state is of the USB audio driver.

I have a fair investment in a USB DAC, amplifier and headphone set up, and wondered if it would be usable under Haiku.

Is there currently a working USB audio driver. If I recall, there was the beginnings of one back in the R5 days.

Mum - "What's Haiku anyway?"

Offspring - "Haiku is a super fast computer system designed for music and film use. You can store your music and films on a special file system that makes finding them a lot easier. It works with all your various gadgets without you knowing it. Your phone will just show up on the screen and you can drag all the photos you took sky diving into a folder for safe keeping. I can do all my music on it and ..."

Mum - "I wish you would get a proper job..."

Offspring - "...Oh for gods sake, the bands gonna make it..."

The idea is to try and see if there is a consensus on what makes Haiku special.

Most tests found here for comparison:
http://www.favbrowser.com/chrome-vs-opera-vs-firefox-vs-internet-explore...

I benchmarked 3 browsers on Haiku.
BezillaBrowser (BZ) 2.0.0.22pre vs Arora 0.10.2 vs Webpositive r459

Each category below is ordered from best to worst. From the results you can see how poorly BeZillaBrowser 2.0.0.x performs against the other two web browsers. Webpositive does very well and Arora fairly good too. Very good reason why Haiku requires a better browser than BeZillaBrowser 2.0

I noticed that haiku-os.org did not display correct with Arora.

UPDATE 1: Adding in test results for Firefox 3.6.3, Chrome 4.1.x running on Windows 7 64bit.
UPDATE 2: PeaceKeeper Benchmarks updated

Acid3 Test
Chrome(W): 100/100
Webpositive: 98/100
Arora: 98/100
Firefox(W): 94/100
BZ: 52/100

html5test
Chrome(W): 118/160
Firefox(W): 101/160
Webpositive: 73/160
Arora: 58/160
BZ: Failed To Run

CSS Selectors Test
Webpositive: From the 43 selectors 41 have passed, 0 are buggy and 2 are unsupported (Passed 576 out of 578 tests)
Arora: From the 43 selectors 41 have passed, 0 are buggy and 2 are unsupported (Passed 574 out of 578 tests)
BZ: From the 43 selectors 26 have passed, 10 are buggy and 7 are unsupported (Passed 357 out of 578 tests)

V8 - Google's Javascript benchmark
Chrome(W): 3325
Webpositive: 537
Firefox(W): 435
Arora: 347
BZ: 50

Sunspider - Apple's Webkit Javascript benchmark
Chrome(W): 659.6ms +/- 5.1%
Firefox(W): 1165.2ms +/- 2.1%
Webpositive: 1753.8ms +/- 0.6%
Arora: 3270.8ms +/- 0.4%
BZ: 24588.2ms +/- 1.0%

CSS Rendering (onLoad)
Arora: 61 ms
Webpositive: 173 ms
Chrome(W): 195 ms
Firefox(W): 233 ms
BZ: 720 ms

Table Rendering
Webpositive: 272 ms
Chrome(W): 725 ms
Arora: 729 ms
Firefox(W): 730 ms
BZ: 2585 ms

PeaceKeeper Benchmark
Chrome(W): 3374
Firefox(W): 2873
Arora: 1630 (updated)
BZ: 252
Webpositive: N/A - does not finish

I'm interested to know what API model Haiku will be implementing to allow professional sound applications to be written.

On Windows we have a variety of API's such as WDM from Microsoft, ASIO and VST/VSTi from Steinberg and Rewire from Propellarheads. On apple we have AU and Jack OSX and on Linux we have quite a few but the best appears to be Jack and ALSA. There are other ones from Pro Tools too.

So on Haiku what's it going to be?

A professional level sound API must be low latency to allow realtime dsp of audio and allow the audio to be routable between hardware and software and between software and software etc.

Obviously the appeal of Haiku is it's ultrafast use of multi core processing and it's heritage coming from BeOS, the media OS.

I'm not too concerned about midi since this appears to be already done and in the API, but what about sound? I noticed OSS has come along but is this the best on offer? I realise that hardware support is needed and it seems to come with alot of driver support. But what I am talking about is professional level implementations for IO, routing and dsp processing.

So what are the long term goals for getting audio up to scratch in Haiku and will this become part of Haiku for professional sound and have it's own native API.