On Feb 1, 2004, at 4:01 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Ryan Underwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Module files are usually a reasonable compromise between quality and
size for soundtracks. The disadvantage of tracker files compared to
MIDI is that they are larger since they contain the samples. The
advantage is that you know they will sound identical no matter where
they are played and whether or not the end user has MIDI hardware or not.
MPEG 4 Structured Audio (SA) was designed to solve this problem, in that its
normative (sounds the same everywhere), but if you have algorithmic
synthesis techniques you like, there's no need for samples, and so the
files can be very small. SA been through a few Corrigenda (i.e.
bug-fixes to the standard), so its a pretty stable standard now. See:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/index.html
Note: I'm not an MPEG member, the paragraph below is my own personal opinion, and doesn't reflect MPEG's view on the topic:
I'm starting to think that what could help SA find its way into
applications is a strict sub-setting of the language -- pick a simple
to implement subset of keywords and opcodes that solve a lot
of useful problems, and code up interpreters and compilers that
accept only the subset. The content would be upward-compatible
with full SA decoders (like sfront), but if the subset was well chosen,
the complexity of implementing SA would shrink to the point where
a motivated undergrad could do it as a senior project. The hope
would be that once there was momentum, the people-power to
do full implementations would appear, or the will to standardize
the subset in MPEG would appear.
--- John Lazzaro http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro lazzaro [at] cs [dot] berkeley [dot] edu ---
