ALSA: compress: add support for gapless playback

this add new API for sound compress to support gapless playback.
As noted in Documentation change, we add API to send metadata of encoder and
padding delay to DSP. Also add API for indicating EOF and switching to
subsequent track

Also bump the compress API version

Signed-off-by: Jeeja KP <jeeja.kp@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Vinod Koul <vinod.koul@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>

1 files changed, 46 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sound/alsa/compress_offload.txt b/Documentation/sound/alsa/compress_offload.txt
index 90e9b3a11abc..0bcc55155911 100644
--- a/Documentation/sound/alsa/compress_offload.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sound/alsa/compress_offload.txt
@@ -145,6 +145,52 @@ Modifications include:
 - Addition of encoding options when required (derived from OpenMAX IL)
 - Addition of rateControlSupported (missing in OpenMAX AL)
 
+Gapless Playback
+================
+When playing thru an album, the decoders have the ability to skip the encoder
+delay and padding and directly move from one track content to another. The end
+user can perceive this as gapless playback as we dont have silence while
+switching from one track to another
+
+Also, there might be low-intensity noises due to encoding. Perfect gapless is
+difficult to reach with all types of compressed data, but works fine with most
+music content. The decoder needs to know the encoder delay and encoder padding.
+So we need to pass this to DSP. This metadata is extracted from ID3/MP4 headers
+and are not present by default in the bitstream, hence the need for a new
+interface to pass this information to the DSP. Also DSP and userspace needs to
+switch from one track to another and start using data for second track.
+
+The main additions are:
+
+- set_metadata
+This routine sets the encoder delay and encoder padding. This can be used by
+decoder to strip the silence. This needs to be set before the data in the track
+is written.
+
+- set_next_track
+This routine tells DSP that metadata and write operation sent after this would
+correspond to subsequent track
+
+- partial drain
+This is called when end of file is reached. The userspace can inform DSP that
+EOF is reached and now DSP can start skipping padding delay. Also next write
+data would belong to next track
+
+Sequence flow for gapless would be:
+- Open
+- Get caps / codec caps
+- Set params
+- Set metadata of the first track
+- Fill data of the first track
+- Trigger start
+- User-space finished sending all,
+- Indicaite next track data by sending set_next_track
+- Set metadata of the next track
+- then call partial_drain to flush most of buffer in DSP
+- Fill data of the next track
+- DSP switches to second track
+(note: order for partial_drain and write for next track can be reversed as well)
+
 Not supported:
 
 - Support for VoIP/circuit-switched calls is not the target of this