Forgive me for sounding rather naive, but anyway. If you come up with an idea, blissfully unaware that there is a patent on it. How can that patent be valid? For example, as a programmer and audio enthusiast I have never even heard of Gigasampler or Halion. However, I have come to the logical conclusion that you would need to pre-cache audio data from disk before sending it to the sound device in small fragments to avoid the sound breaking up due to the latency of accessing those samples from disk... phew
I hardly see this idea as original, or patentable, its just plain and simple logic. Fair enough if you stole their exact implementation line for line, but we're implementing this with open source in mind for an entirely different platform and not for profit. Bottom line, screw them and their patent. Let them send their lawyers after you, who cares. If it comes to that, post an article to slashdot about it and get people from russia etc to mirror it. Anyone who posts messages on a developer forum about patent issues isn't a real programmer anyway, a real programmer wouldn't give a stuff and write the code anyway.. =) What are we, patent fearing wimps or real men? More than my two cents, ;) Dave.