Blockhead dev log #3 (Patreon)

I spent the entire day trying to get the declicking mechanism to also work with the sample modulation envelopes. The entire thing is really complicated.

Audio programming falls under the umbrella of something called "real time computing" which is something I had to learn about for this project. One of the things that makes it so challenging is that the audio thread has a number of stipulations that it must adhere to, the big ones being that it's is never allowed to allocate or deallocate memory, or lock any mutexes. This means communication between the GUI thread and the audio thread has to be done using lock-free synchronization mechanisms. And when the audio thread is finished with an object, it's not allowed to deallocate it, so there has to be some form of garbage collection in place.

Occasionally I'll get stuck on this stuff for several days at a time. In this case I think I'm nearly there so hopefully I can get it working tomorrow.