Is there a way to give real time audio as input and get multiple channel output ?

I want to give real-time audio as input and get multiple channel output and process each channel and send the output to an external DAC?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

Yes, that is generally possible, provided that you are willing to live with the latency (which will probably be over 12 ms even for ASIO devices.)

For this purpose you should probably avoid using USB microphones or DAC: they might not be able to handle your latency. In particular you must strongly avoid having the input sound and the output DAC be on the same USB controller.

https://www.mathworks.com/help/daq/multichannel-audio-input-and-output-1.html

https://www.mathworks.com/help/audio/examples/live-direction-of-arrival-estimation-with-a-linear-microphone-array.html

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/4017-pa-wavplay

[Arvind Ramanathan]

All these examples have microphone signal as the input what if I want to give iTunes or some API as input?

[Walter Roberson]

iTunes is not a signal.

I have never heard of an API that allowed an outside program to grab copies of the fully-decoded samples that iTunes is sending to the sound cards. The closest I can think of to that would be if you wrote a custom iTunes Visualizer that pushed out whatever information it was able to figure out, sending it to a place that MATLAB could use as input. It might be possible, but it would take a bit of work.

What you would normally do is either loop-back the iTunes signal (e.g., plug the headphone output back in to the mic jack), or else use microphones to record what you were getting from a speaker output. And then we are back to the microphone situation.

[Arvind Ramanathan]

That was an excellent explanation. Thanks a lot!