I would like to mix tens of arbitrary stereo audio channels together in software in realtime with a minimum of clipping, distortion, and total loss of volume. I understand there are many special-purpose hardware parts that have been produced over the years that seem to be able to do exactly this. One that I've been trying to learn more about is the Yamaha YAC512; it seems perfect for the task. I have no idea what it would take to emulate such a part, especially such that it can be done in realtime with a modern commodity CPU (or better yet, even a mobile CPU), but I thought I'd ask if any work has been done in this area in various tools/plugins/projects that I could learn from.
My current algorithm to mix is I sum all my channels and divide by the total channel count. Sound quality is good, but it's way too quiet, of course! :/
So, does anyone know of hardware emulators that can mix many audio streams the way the YAC512 can that would be suitable for realtime/game processing? My source channels' audio samples are generated and available to me as floating point values.
Here's a datasheet I found for the YAC512, but it doesn't tell me much that I have the ability to work with: http://datasheet.seekic.com/PdfFile/YAC/YAC512Mnbsp.pdf
Thanks!