I am currently working on planning a multi-component software system that consists of an Audio Server Plugin and an application for user interaction. I have very little experience with IPC/XPC and its performance implications, so I hope I can find a little guidance here.
The Audio Server plugin publishes a number of multi-channel output devices on which it should perform computations and pass the result on to a different Core Audio device. My concerns here are:
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Can the plugin directly access other CoreAudio devices for audio output or is this prohibited by the sandboxing? If it cannot, would relaying the audio data via XPC be a good idea in terms of low latency stability?
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Can I use metal compute from within the Audio Server plugin? I have not found any information about metal related sandboxing entitlements. I am also concerned about performance implications as above.
Regarding the user interface application, I would like to know:
- If a process that has not been started by launchd can communicate with the Audio Server plugin using XPC. If not, would a user agent instead of an app be a better choice? Or are there other communication channels that would work with sandboxing?
Thank you very much!
Andreas