Waveform Thread Refactor

Waveform Thread Refactor

Summary and Rationale

Status: This specification is abandoned. The WaveSummary thread was replaced by the AnalyserQueue in Mixxx 1.7.0.

The current WaveSummary thread does not work for our purposes. There are specifically two problems:

• The thread works as a queue, and can only process requests serially.

• The thread is not capable of aborting the processing of a specific song.

Problem Cases

Examples of usage that leads to problems:

Example 1

• User loads a song to deck 1
• User loads a song to deck 2
• User loads a song to deck 1

What happens: The waveform thread has 3 items queued. It will take a while to process the first one, and the two others will not be processed until the first is done. This results in no waveform view displaying for either deck until the processing of the first song is done.

What should happen: A song should have its waveform displayed the second it is loaded to a deck. If a song leaves the deck, CPU time should not be wasted on it anymore.

Proposed Solution

Make the following changes to WaveSummary Thread

• Eliminate the queue functionality
• Generate both the waveform summary and visual waveform downsampled data, and store them privately
• Support a 'halt' method which will cause it to stop processing, and shut down its thread.
• Support being started at any time to generate the visual waveform or waveform summary of the TrackInfoObject that it corresponds to.
• If work on either of the 2 buffers has already completed, it will not repeat work.
• The WaveSummary thread will be in charge of the deletion of the wavesummary buffer and visual waveform buffer

Make the following changes to TrackInfoObject

• Every TrackInfoObject will have its own WaveSummary object
• TrackInfoObject will no longer hold pointers to the WaveSummary object. The getWaveSummary and getVisualWaveform calls will remain, but they will be replaced with inline calls to the corresponding get method of the WaveSummary Thread.

Make the following changes to Track

• Where it previously queued a track for WaveSummary processing, ensure the TrackInfoObject has a WaveSummary thread, and start it

There will be other minor changes to other places in the codebase, but these are the most significant.

Current Work

Who is interested in doing this: rryan

Currently, the rryan-wavesummary-refactor branch is a half-done version of this. (9/2008)