Re: midi player?

[Simon Kagedal <simon sdf se>]

Hi,

On Sat, Jun 13, 1998 at 05:53:19AM +0000, Zack Williams wrote:

> Midi is an example of a medium that should not be mixed with other music 
> streams of the same type. I had always assumed the simultaneous sound features 
> of EsounD were to be used not to mix music, but to allow output of user event 
> sounds (warnings, sounds from window manager events, etc.) Having any two 
> simultaneous, contiuous sound streams, no matter what the format, would result 
> in an undesireably cacophony. For formats such as midi or mod that can really 

Undesirable for who? Excuse me if I'm totally misunderstanding you, but I
can think of a lot of situations where one would want to play several
continous sound streams - crossfading between two songs, listening to
a tracker module quietly while hearing and RA interview, crazy
experimenting ... These are all jobs for EsounD...

IMHO, MIDI is nothing EsounD should care about. If one wants to access
/dev/sequencer or /dev/midi while using esound, that's no problem. 
(right?) And if one wants to use a software synthesizer such as 
timidity, that can be made output to EsounD.

(for some interesting MIDI things, check out NetMIDI [1], a 
 protocol for MIDI over TCP/IP, and midid [2], a MIDI daemon)

> only play contiunous music, it would not be a great limitation to only allow one
> of these formats to play at once. Even better would be one continuous music
> stream per channel, for even greater flexibility. 

I don't understand why such a limitation would be needed, and this
about "one stream per channel" I don't get at all. What kind of channel?

> Zack (feeling exposed from all of this non-lurking)

Here's another lurker (mostly), but I'm interested in this since I'd
like to help coding on sound things in GNOME. 

Has EsounD been chosen as The audio server for GNOME? I know in the
beginning of the the RHAD Labs "Rumour Mill" there was talk about
using NAS. Has anyone done a thorough comparison? Not that EsounD
doesn't look great to me, I'm just wondering.

Thanks,

[1] NetMIDI: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dgslomin/netmidi/
[2] midid: http://www.umr.edu/~johns/projects/midid/

-- 
Simon Kågedal <simon@sdf.se> - Homepage: http://www.sdf.se/~simon/