Re: formats for Free sounds

[Conrad Parker <conradp cse unsw edu au>]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2000 at 08:05:28PM -0500, Erik Jarvi wrote:
> 
> INAP (I'm not a programer) but couldn't you "just cut and paste" into the sound
> file itself?

not quite -- it's fiddly, and usually requires the creation of
special data chunks within the file to store the text. This is
really best done through the existing libraries, such as
libaudiofile, which understand the file formats.

> Would it be helpful or practical to be able to use gziped text
> files? (thinking that the license could possibly be larger then the audio file)

if this were done it would not be possible to extract the text
using any existing audio tools. Also, the formats usually specify
ASCII text, so binary gzip'd data could get corrupted by some
software.

If size is a concern, the same or better compression would be
achieved by gzipping the resulting audio file, ie. if sound.aiff
contains 18K of text licensing, sound.aiff.gz will be no larger than
a file containing the same sound with the same text as a gzipped,
embedded comment.

However we may wish to use licenses which don't bloat the files
substantially, eg. which may be included by reference (giving a url
rather than the full text), or which are concise.

Conrad.