Re: [linux-audio-user] sf2 soundfont spec license

From: <james@email-addr-hidden-dot-dat.net>
Date: Sat Mar 12 2005 - 13:18:54 EET

On Fri, 11 Mar, 2005 at 11:52PM +0100, Christoph Eckert spake thus:
> Hi,
>
>
> > Why not start it then?  Even if you're not a coder, you can
> > start drafting the requirements and a human level
> > specification.
>
> well, to be honest, I'm not a coder, and I'm not familiar
> enough with sampling to create specs. Sounds as a wiki would
> be helpful.

Well, you could at least start with what you want from the new
format. What exactly do you want that soundfonts can't provide?
 
> > Forget XML, packing and whatknot and just
> > describe, hierarchically or otherwise, what the file should
> > contain.
>
> XML is hip, nothing else :) .
>
> Anyway, maybe it's wrong for a sampling format, but otherwise
> the advantage is that it is easily human readable as well as
> machine creatable.
>
> Just some hours before I read that there are people who'd like
> to create soundfonts automatically on remote machines; so the
> new format should be able to be created via shell scripts as
> well as defined easily be blind users or GUI frontends. So I
> guessed that XML isn't the least choice.
>
> > Even if you are a coder, don't always jump for XML.  While
> > it's certainly human readable, it's often about as easy to
> > read as a postscript file (also human readable).
>
> This depends on the format. XML is a syntax or markup; you're
> right, there are XML files which are not very human readable.
> But we can do it better :) .

I agree that XML isn't necessarily hard to read, but imagine 3 or 4
levels of hierarchy, with between 5 and 15 parameters in each. The
format used by sf2text (which doesn't even consider all parameters) is
quite slim compared to XML-style tagging and yet the output can be
huge.

> > Anyway, my suggestion is: get the ball rolling.  Once it's
> > specced, all that's needed is a library for processing the
> > file and it would be a fairly simple job to make things
> > like fluid work with the new format.
>
> I'm not that optimistic, but maybe I'm wrong.

I'm an optimistic person. For me the glass is always full, even if
most of it is just full of carbon dioxide, oxygen and other gases.

>
> Best regards
>
>
> ce
>
>

-- 
"I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated Development
That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb.  Thank you."
(By Vance Petree, Virginia Power)
Received on Sat Mar 12 16:15:09 2005

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