Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Analog Devices | Subject: VisualAudio
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 18 November 2004
Environment speeds development of
DSP-based audio
The VisualAudio design and development environment is designed to significantly shorten the time, cost and risk required to bring new, fully optimised audio products to market.
Analog Devices has expanded its support for developers of audio systems with the availability of its VisualAudio design and development environment, designed to significantly shorten the time, cost and risk required to bring new, fully optimised audio products to market For use initially with ADI's SHARC processor family, which leads the industry in performance for audio applications, VisualAudio provides an intuitive graphical environment along with most of the foundational software required for audio products, enabling developers to focus their time and energies on the features that will differentiate their products competitively
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 2 Jul 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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"Developers of audio products appreciate any edge that will enhance their ability to compete in today's challenging, fast-evolving audio markets", said Brian McAloon, Group Vice President and General Manager, Digital Signal Processing Systems Division, Analog Devices "VisualAudio provides a graphical design and development environment that lets audio system developers easily design custom post-processing networks, quickly generate product-ready code and dynamically tune output via real-time tweaking of digital signal processing modules such as delay, reverb, equalisers and tone controls".
"By handling the nuts and bolts of audio product development, VisualAudio frees developers' time and creativity to concentrate on the features that will make their products stand out among the competition, and it opens the audio market to a broader range of developers".
"The VisualAudio design and development environment from Analog Devices has significantly accelerated the development of our next-generation teleconferencing products powered by ADI's high-performance SHARC processors", said Keith McMillen, President and CEO of Berkeley, California-based Octiv.
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"It has flexible and powerful features such as the customisable framework, well-documented open API and product-ready code generating capability".
"VisualAudio allows us to encourage refinement during the development process while simultaneously reducing time to market".
VisualAudio plugs into the VisualDSP++ integrated development and debugging environment (sold separately) and is beneficial for designing, tuning and testing audio products and generating product-ready (for example, MIPS- and memory-optimised) code.
It includes a customisable software framework, a large library of optimised audio modules, host communication and tuning interface and support for a broad range of audio decoders, along with much of the other software that is common to most audio products.
In this way, it alleviates the need for developers to replicate this foundational software for each new product.
By maximising software reuse, and through its predefined building blocks and graphical interface, the VisualAudio environment simplifies design and development complexity and reduces the associated cost and risk.
The result is significantly faster time to market for high-quality audio products with important differentiating features.
The modular VisualAudio software architecture, along with application-specific software frameworks within the architecture, can be adapted to a customer's target hardware.
It is also easy for ADI's customers and third-party developers to integrate their own audio algorithms and components into the graphical environment.
As a result, VisualAudio is well-suited to the design and development of consumer, professional and business audio products.
Working in conjunction with Analog Devices' VisualDSP++ IDDE, VisualAudio generates MIPS- and memory-optimised product-ready code by leveraging SIMD (single-instruction multiple-data) operations, without requiring users to possess specialised knowledge of digital signal processing or audio algorithms.
In addition, VisualAudio is extensible through an open external Component Object Model (COM) interface, so that any COM-compliant application, such as C/C++ or Matlab, can seamlessly integrate into the toolchain and be used for audio module design and real-time tuning.
Users' existing design environments can work in tandem with VisualAudio, repetitive operations can be automated, and custom graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can be used to control the audio system that is being developed.
The external COM interface also can exchange audio data with the SHARC processor.
With this feature, developers can perform bit-accurate regression tests and verify the integrity of a product's signal chain.
VisualAudio supports ADI's third-generation SHARC processors, namely the ADSP-2126x and ADSP-2136x families, through the use of VisualDSP++ release 3.5 for the SHARC processor family and natively supports the ADSP-21262 EZ-Kit Lite and ADSP-21364 EZ-Kit Lite evaluation platforms.
The VisualAudio environment had its genesis with Staccato Systems, which ADI purchased, and the audio technology developers at the world-renowned Stanford Centre for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
The VisualAudio design and development environment is available now for an MSRP of $1995 per site licence.
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