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espressif / esp-adf

Espressif Audio Development Framework
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Better documentation/participation from Espressif on ADF forums (AUD-5118) #1129

Open ahemberger opened 6 months ago

ahemberger commented 6 months ago

I'm an individual trying to learn ESP-ADF, and I'm finding the process of coming up to speed with it very difficult, compared to how easy it has been to learn IDF. I'm curious why this is.

I'd love to understand ADF better; is it intended to be a thing that people are actively using? If so, how is one meant to learn it? The code itself is confusing, as is managing the various versions of IDF/ADF, understanding how the two interact with one another, etc. The little information I can find online makes ADF seem at once very ambitious and very vague.

Fundamentally, I would like to put myself on the path to developing a product, but I'm a single person, not a company or a team, so I'm reliant on documentation and active participation in forums. ADF seems to feature neither of these - the ADF forum has way more questions than answers, the documentation for ADF seems incomplete, and I cannot find any resources that suggest ADF is intended for production.

IDF has been fun and interesting to learn, and its obviously-active development gave me confidence to invest time to learn it. But my project requires some simple audio functionality, which has caused me to intersect with ADF, and I've gotten very stuck trying to learn it.

jason-mao commented 5 months ago

@ahemberger Thank you for sharing your feedback with ESP-ADF. We apologize for any difficulties you may have experienced and appreciate your dedication to learning and using our software. ADF is used in many practical applications. If you have any specific questions, feel free to give us feedback here.

ahemberger commented 5 months ago

For starters, is there any documentation anywhere that describes how one is meant to create a custom 'board', if one is using a breadboarded setup? I'm aware of the "play_mp3_control" example, but I find the "my_board" example code quite difficult to understand - there's no context offered for anything, and it's presented assuming a user knows how to make sense of it.

In general, there are no code comments anywhere, very little context is offered that I can find, and it feels quite difficult to learn just from reading examples. IDF is very well-documents and I've found it much easier to come up to speed on.

It's also incredibly difficult to get answers on espressif's ADF community boards on esp32.com - there are heaps of questions that go unanswered there. Same for asking questions on Reddit. It seems built and useful only for someone who intimately understands IDF and each of the internal components of ADF.

In my case, all I want to do is specify an audio file, and decode it into a buffer of samples that I can manipulate. I finally gave up because I can't make sense of the examples.