Comment by qwertox

"Even if they are creating their own plugins, they are probably not integrating with the audio interface".

The audio interface is abstracted away in exchange for some metadata about the buffer's properties and the buffer itself, and that is true for basically everything related to audio: the buffer is the lowest level the OS offers you, and you are free to implement lower-level stuff in your dsp/instrument, like using assembly, maybe also functions for SSE, AVX or NEON based acceleration.

You get chunks of samples in a buffer, you read them, do something with them and write the result out into another buffer.

"Pipewire supports audio channels over network" thanks for reminding me: I'm planning to stream the audio out of my Windows machine to a raspi zero to which I will then connect my bluetooth headphones. First tests worked, but the latency is really bad with shairport-sync [0] at around 400 ms. This is what I would use Pipewire for, if my workstation were Linux and not Windows.

Maybe Snapcast [1] could be interesting for you: "Snapcast is a multiroom client-server audio player, where all clients are time synchronized with the server to play perfectly synced audio. It's not a standalone player, but an extension that turns your existing audio player into a Sonos-like multiroom solution."

"I could see something like a "live coding symphony", where people have their own livecoding setups and the audio is generated on a central server." Tidal Cycles [2] might interest you, or the JavaScript port named Strudel [3]. Tidal can synchronize multiple instances via Link Synchronization. Then there's Troop [4], which "is a real-time collaborative tool that enables group live coding within the same document across multiple computers. Hypothetically Troop can talk to any interpreter that can take input as a string from the command line but it is already configured to work with live coding languages FoxDot, TidalCycles, and SuperCollider."

[0] https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync

[1] https://github.com/snapcast/snapcast

[2] https://tidalcycles.org

[3] https://strudel.cc

[4] https://github.com/Qirky/Troop*