Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents
Streams, channels and chunks
Decks, tracks, layers and sounds
Envelopes and mix automation
Processing latency and caching

Axel is an audio sequencing and mixing library that provides a multichannel, sparse audio data container (streams), a structured mixing abstraction (decks), and widely useful means of generating control data (via envelopes) and of caching audio data.

Streams, channels and chunks

Figure 1-1. Inside an Axel stream

The abstraction of multichannel audio data in Axel is known as a stream. The structure of a stream is shown in Figure 1-1. A stream may consist of multiple channels, each of which can consist of an arbitrary number of sparsely placed chunks of raw audio data. The channels are named with spatial names such as LEFT, RIGHT and CENTRE as required for common home, studio and theatre environments.

Generic routines are provided for mixing, multiplying and blending streams of data.