Thank you posting the videos - as you say, it's difficult to put into words, and the visuals really help understand what you're working on. It looks amazing, by the way. As to your questions:
1. it is possible to merge the sizes with GDI+, but you could even just use the WIA Com object (which I read is just a wrapper for the GDI+ API, but I could be wrong). I can try and find the code I found for that, if helpful.
2. From what I've read, that would exceed the limits for an image, but would it need to be a single image? My feeling is that once you've reach that kind of territory for a single image, you can't help but expect performance improvements.
In terms of GDI+, this is exactly what I've been trying to teach myself over the past few months, and while there is plenty out there for GDI and GDI+, it's a bit trickier and scarcer to find tutorials/information specifically for VBA, and moreover, already adjusted for 64bit! It's been time consuming, but as you say, it's mostly reverse engineering what Jaafar has very kindly produced, and trying to see how each of the pieces work. If you're interested, I can try compile a list of resources I've found to be helpful - there is an excellent tutorial on a French language site specifically for GDI+ for Excel VBA 32+64 bit. It's really good. (Google Chrome automatically translates it for me
)
My (untrained and inexperienced) gut feeling is that you should be able to do those waveforms with GDI+ and I suspect that you could see improved performance.
To that end, when you've finished digesting all of Jaafar's work (or if you have already), you should check out the projects produced by The Trick (a VB6 programmer) - to a layperson such as myself, there seems to be a bit of overlap with what you're doing/interested in - namely, music, sound visualisation, vb and graphics (he uses GDI+). Perhaps the most relevant example can be see here with the video for his
sound class, but there's also a
audio spectrum visualiser, and a
8-bit retro music / audio synthesiser. The sound class in particular I know comes with an example project where it records sound and generates waveforms at runtime. It's a bit slow on my computer, but as we've already seen, my current system is a ridiculous benchmark, and so I'm sure it would run very smoothly on a system with 16gb ram! I would also add, looking at his code, he creates the graphics with a picturebox (which we annoyingly don't get in VBA) which I understand is slower than GDI+.
You may want to 'b u m p' this post to see if someone else has anything more helpful to contribute. I feel a bit bad about dragging your query out of the Unanswered threads section...
