Switchboard Overview
What is Switchboard?
If you haven’t already, we suggest reviewing the Switchboard website for a higher level overview, including our How it works page. As outlined on that page, Switchboard comprises many audio building blocks for building audio software. Note that Switchboard is geared towards real time audio software development, though we do have non-real time features as well.
The diagram below shows you how Switchboard is structured. Pay attention to the following major aspects of its organization
Two ways to use Switchboard
There are two primary ways to use Switchboard.
- Go to our Downloads page and access the individual libraries you want to work with.
- Use the Switchboard Editor, our no-code tool which helps to build and test audio pipelines in the browser.
These are not mutually exclusive. Think of the Switchboard Editor as a tool that makes it easier to work with the individual libraries. When you create your audio pipelines using the Switchboard Editor, we automatically generate JSON which can then be used by the platform specific libraries to build the same audio graph on that platform.
The idea being that you can construct an audio pipeline and test it in the browser, then when it works / sounds the way you want it to, you can replicate that on each platform very easily and it will sound the same on all platforms
In reality, the Switchboard Editor does not support 100% of the capabilities that the individual libraries support. Therefore:
You should expect to use Switchboard as a combination of #1 and #2.
Moreover, our documentation portal and SDKs are under active development. Should you have questions or requests for features, don’t hesitate to Get in Touch. Note that while we strive to answer all inquiries, support is very limited in the free tier. We do our best to provide tools that allow you to generate your own key and get started without needing to reach out.
We also provide a free tier (see Licenses / Pricing), open source libraries and example code that should help you get pretty far on your own. Nevertheless, our team is available to help you integrate and customize Switchboard as needed.
Who should use Switchboard and why?
To summarize
Who? -- Potentially anyone building audio software. Music and real time communication (RTC) apps are popular examples but anyone building audio apps or audio features stands to benefit, especially as the number of features or number of target platforms increases.
Why? -- It will save you time because it’s easy to use and saves you from getting into the weeds of C++ and real time audio programming; you will get high performance, robust code without spending months debugging common audio issues; it’s flexible, customizable, and extensible; instant cross platform capabilities; quickly test and prototype different third party offerings; and we can help you with anything that isn’t clear from the documentation vis a vis customizations and custom development services.
We’ve answered these questions in more detail over at switchboard.audio.