Re: slooow GUI - SLab General Remarks

: Hi!

: I downloaded and tried SLab-2.20.1. Great program,
: but I've never seen a GUI that was *that* slow.
: My box is a 233 MHz K6 (64MB), and some functions
: of the program are nearly unusable (try to make
: the waveform window fullscreen and move the cursor..).

: Any ideas? (please Cc:).

: ciao,
: johnny

The GUI is not the fastest in the world since it is dependent on TCL/TK, which is an interpreted language. The "WaveMeter" widget is a C code binary though, and already has a range of accelerators built in, such as wave caching from disk, and pixmap caching for the display. As you move the cursor, the wavemeter will paint the crosshairs over the existing pixmap, and repaint the results to your display. The tools was developed on a P133, and in my opinion (which may be biased since I wrote the code) the results were reasonable. I have tested the code on P266 systems without an accelerated X server, and the results were, to be honest, dismal, I agree. If you do not have an accelerated server then the repainting is down with software rather than a DMA hardware operation. I can speed this up if you want, simply by removing the red crosshairs and dropping the mouse tracking?

On an unrelated subject, SLab is now revised to 2.30, rather than the 1.0 code that a few postings have been referring to. Each release expires on a 12 month basis, with the beta code generally on 6 months. Why? Largely since I do not want to support 1.0 and 2.0 code, so users are rather unkindly requested to upgrade via the expiry code. You can get 2.30 from the ftp site below, kindly hosted by Nico Augustijn in the Netherlands. This code will presently be uploaded to the Linux/mirrors.

ftp://dutw1288.wbmt.tudelft.nl/pub/audio

Finally, regarding interoperability on different systems: there are 2 main dependencies in the code, these are libc and OSS versions. From 2.30 there will be 2 releases, one of which will be statically compiled and will remove generic library dependencies at the expense of larger executables. It is not possible to remove the OSS dependencies, so you are advised to test with OSS/Free and your soundcard. If this fails you can test with OSS/Linux demo drivers, and purchase them if they work (if not, send me an EMail and I will help you with debugging the problems). TCL/TK has always been statically linked, I should remove it from the LSM file since you should not need either of these installed to actually run SLab.

Best Regards,

Nick