AMD Radeon TrueAudio-Next Finally Going Cross-Platform With Linux Support

TrueAudio-Next is AMD's solution for advanced GPU-accelerated audio effects and other capabilities by leveraging OpenCL compute rather than any dedicated DSP audio hardware. While developed as open-source the past three years, there hasn't been official Linux support but that seems to finally be changing.

A Phoronix reader pointed out this beta-cross-platform branch of TrueAudio-Next (TAN) that was created a few days ago. While the documentation continues to point to only Windows support, the updated CMake build system confirms not only Windows support but also Linux and even Apple macOS.

Hopefully this new CMake cross-platform support will be merged to mainline TrueAudio-Next soon and resulting in an official Linux release. TrueAudio-Next can be used by the likes of Steam and other game engines directly. The last commit to the mainline TrueAudio-Next code-base was actually back in May 2018 so seeing renewed activity in TAN is nice and will hopefully see more work and adoption in 2020.

TrueAudio-Next does require working OpenCL support, which means either using the AMDGPU-PRO binary driver or the ROCm OpenCL stack on supported hardware/distributions.