Using Beads or other libraries for multichannel audio output

I’m looking for an audio library that supports multichannel (at least 4) audio outputs. From the research I’ve done, it sounds like Beads should support this but I’m not able to find specific information in the beads tutorial/PDF or in their documentation.

This is the most promising thread I’ve found but I don’t understand the implementation that is suggested: https://forum.processing.org/two/discussion/16611/multichannel-audio

Does anyone have experience with this? I’m looking for a basic example showing how to use Beads or another library to control multiple output channels.

Which OS are you on? There’s a difference in how JavaSound represents multi-channel audio - as one device, or multiple stereo devices - depending on the OS. On Linux you can do multi-channel audio with JavaSound quite easily, Windows is more difficult, and I’m not sure about macOS.

The other option mentioned in that thread is JACK - http://jackaudio.org/ This is a better bet for this purpose, and will perform better than JavaSound. I wrote the bindings for JACK that Beads uses as part of PraxisLIVE.

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Hey thanks, I’m on OSX. I would be open to using JavaSound or JACK. Maybe JavaSound would be more straightforward since (I think) it’s a standard library.

In either case, I’m not clear on how to interface between Beads and the audio channels these libraries expose. I’m a developer but I have limited experience with Java and audio programming. Ideally, I’m trying to find a Processing “hello world” type example for sending distinct audio output to more than two channels. Do you know of anything like this or do you have sample code from the binding you wrote that might be helpful and/or do you know of any tutorials/documentation I should be looking at?

Thanks!

I should have been clearer, if you’re using JavaSound on anything other than Linux this probably isn’t possible. Which leaves you with Beads and JACK or looking for another audio library option that doesn’t rely on JavaSound.