Binary Data

Binary messages are what Data Flow use for transferring binary data (e.g. audio) to and from Data Flow servers. Nodes also receive/send binary messages between each other.

When a node wants to send binary data it sends that as a binary message, who will receive that binary message is determined by that node's outlet connections.

Assume node-A sends binary-A.

• If node-A outlet is connected to node-B, then node-B receives binary-A as input. At that point it is up to node-B to determine what to do with binary-A, it can take some action upon it or just ignore it.
• If node-A outlet is connected to the Publisher node, then binary-A is sent to the other side of the connection, ie. the client receives this binary message.

In Data Flow most of the binary messages are currently audio messages.
See audio for details:

Audio

While clients send their audio to Data Flow servers for speech analysis, Data Flow servers also send audio data to clients in case of Text To Speech (TTS) etc.

Caveats

• When a client is sending multichannel audio (stereo), the samples must be interleaved ie. one sample per channel should follow each other.

• When a client is sending audio, it should not cut samples in half. Assuming 16bits(2 bytes) per sample

  • mono: client binary array's byte count should be a multiple of 2.

  • stereo : client binary array's byte count should be a multiple of 4.