PIPES: A Networked Rapid Development Protocol for Sound Applications

The development of audio Digital Signal Processing (DSP) algorithms typically requires iterative design, analysis, and testing, possibly on different target platforms, furthermore often asking for resets or restarts of execution environments between iterations. Manually performing deployment, setup, and output data collection can quickly become intolerably time-consuming. Therefore, we propose a new, experimental, open-ended, and automatable protocol to separate the coding, building, and deployment tasks onto different network nodes. The proposed protocol is mostly based on widespread technology and designed to be easy to implement and integrate with existing software infrastructure. Its flexibility has been validated through a proof-of-concept implementation. Despite being still in its infancy, it already shows potential in allowing faster and more comfortable development workflows.