I have an AUv3 plugin which uses an FFT - which requires n samples before it can produce any output - so, depending on the relation between the host's buffer size and the FFT window size, it may receive a several buffers of samples, producing no output, and then dumping out what it has once a sufficient number of samples have been received.
This means that output is produced in fits and starts, in batches that match the FFT size (modulo oversampling) - e.g. if being fed buffers of 256 samples with an fft size of 1024, the output buffer sizes will be 0 for the first 3 buffers, and upon the fourth, the first 256 processed samples are returned and the remaining 768 cached; the next three buffers will return the remaining cached samples while processing and buffering subsequent ones, and so forth.
The internal mechanics of that I have solved, caching output if the current output buffer is too small, and so forth - so it all works as advertised, and the plugin reports its latency correctly. And when run as an app in demo-mode, playback works as expected.
In the plugin's render block, it captures the number of frames written, and if it is less than the number of frames passed in, adjusts the mDataByteSize of the output buffers to match the actual quantity of data being returned:
unsigned int framesWritten = (unsigned int) processHelper->processWithEvents(inAudioBufferList, outAudioBufferList, timestamp, frameCount, realtimeEventListHead);
if (framesWritten < frameCount) {
for (UInt32 i = 0; i < outAudioBufferList->mNumberBuffers; ++i) {
outAudioBufferList->mBuffers[i].mDataByteSize = framesWritten * 4; // assume 4 byte floats
}
}
However, there are a couple of serious issues:
auval -v fails it with - Render Test at 64 frames, sample rate: 22050 Hz ERROR: Output Buffer Size does not match requested
When connected to Logic Pro, it appears that mDataByteSize is ignored, and the entire allocated buffer is read - audio has sections of silence snipped into it which corresponds the number of empty buffers being returned
If I set Logic's buffer size to 1024 and use a 1024 sample FFT window, the plugin works correctly - but of course a plugin cannot dictate buffer size, and `1024 is too small a window size to be useful for anything but filtering very high frequencies
This seems like it has to be a solvable problem, and most likely the issue is in how my code reports the number of usable samples in the returned buffer.
So, what is the correct way for a plugin to report that it has no samples to return, but will, uh, real soon now?
I know I could convert this plugin to be one that does offline rendering of the entire input, but this is real-time processing, just with a fixed amount of latency, so that should not be necessary.
