A GPU-Oriented Application Programming Interface for Digital Audio Workstations

A Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is a hardware and/or software device aiming to ease those operations required for music production, such as arranging, recording, editing, mixing, and, more in general, modifying sounds creatively. A peculiarity of a DAW environment is that most of the work is highly parallelizable, since the basic architecture of a DAW consists in the simultaneous processing of different audio tracks, mainly independent from each other. In order to exploit such a feature, this paper proposes an interface that lets the DAW interact with the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in a standardized way. Despite some academic research and experimentation, the professional audio software industry almost never exploited GPUs when implementing entire DAWs, but only when realising very specific tools or third party extensions (plugins). This work also presents and discusses the outcomes of a number of tests conducted in order to choose the optimal architecture. As a result, a GPU-based approach turned to be a valid alternative to the use of CPUs in the computation of audio effects, such as the rendering of audio tracks after mixing and mastering operations, both in real time and offline.