Quick note, before Early Bird pricing ends. I’m speaking at two conferences this Spring.

I’ll be at Forward Swift in San Francisco on March 2. There, I’m doing a talk called “Audio Frameworks and Swift: This Is Fine”. The idea of the talk is to look at how well Swift does and doesn’t work as a language for calling the iOS and Mac audio frameworks. This covers things like how to call the C-based frameworks (Audio Toolbox and the other higher-level parts of Core Audio) from Swift, and where you get into some real mismatches between the languages, and what to do about it. I covered this phenomenon on the blog a while back in Radio on the TV.

My plan is to write an audio reverser app to demo this, as I don’t think there’s a good way to do that in AV Foundation, meaning you’d want to use either Audio Converter Services or Extended Audio Files from Audio Toolbox. Plus, playing music backwards should make for a fun demo.

I’ll also be covering v3 Audio Units, which specifically prohibits you from using Swift in the “kernel” of your AU, since that’s called on a realtime thread and there are all sorts of ways that Swift is not quite yet ready for that kind of use, even though it’s billed as being a systems programming language. I’ll try to make this talk more about the language — what it can and can’t/shouldn’t do, what it’s good and bad at — than the frameworks, to try to make it more approachable. I don’t want this to be a draw only for the people who’ve read the Core Audio book and happen to be in SF that week (if I wanted that, we could just get a table at Super Duper and chat over burgers and beer).

Forward Swift early bird registration ends tomorrow, so hop on it if you’re so inclined.

I’ll be doing this talk again at CocoaConf Chicago on April 21-22, along with the Firebase talk I did at CocoaConfs DC and San Jose last Fall.

CocoaConf’s early bird ends on February 25.

Hope to see you at one or both of these.