Well after the developer summit, three nice things happened: 1. MIDI access to a Wurlitzer RG-5700P 5ft Baby Grand Piano. This is big for development work, but I love the piano and get to play with the 8-track sequencer and hear quality piano sound. I also goto to get some old Roland MIDI boxes to review so get to catch up on some engineering specs. The piano playbacks MIDI and AMD (Advanced MIDI) files on a USB stick and has the MIDI IN/OUT/THRU ports. Developers can use any MIDI-capable digital synthesizer or break-out box they need - my wife just likes grand pianos so a friend let us examine this one for OpenSolaris development use. OSS **does* has MIDI capabilities so I'm looking into expanding it to handle the sequencing of products like the Wurlitzer. (Java Sound module has a MIDI API as well so maybe we can reference it for OSS MIDI expansion)
2. Full featured Rosegarden 1.5.1 and Ardour 2.1 port. I mainly started looking at JACK and Rosegarden for this week and found out a few distros didn't have all of the features enabled. Some of the musicians also use Hydrogen and I use to have a sequencer program called Bars N' Pipes I played with in my more youthful years (before Solaris existed (or a brand name)). Anyhow, I started digging into the coals and see that we can make some serious headway with the latest Rosegarden 1.5.1 and JACK work with the right people in place. There are many nice apps out there like Ableton Live as well to review. I'll play with the music scence some more now that I have SXCE b74 to examine (I'm actually waiting for SXCE b75 and for Sun to fix their patch issues at Sun Solve. :oP 3. Mplayer, SoX, and audio-convert development. We talked about this at the OSS meeting at the Summit which is mainly utilizing conversion programs to playback sound/audio files not support through available apps on OpenSolaris-based distros. Also, looking into **video* support of Blu-Ray, HDVD, and DVD/CD (all playback and recorded) video streams for OpenSolaris-based distros. The one thing is **both** QuickTime 7 and Windows Media Player 11 codecs which may just require licenses to speed up direct ports of the players. I'm also looking at the legacy sound and video formats from yesteryear for native playback on Solaris platforms (without going the emulation route). We are pretty much there if we get into emulators and tools to run other OSes under Solaris (we need that for those multimedia apps not ported to Solaris). We still have issues not having recently updated Qt/kdelibs under **every** OpenSolaris distro to utilize KDE multimedia apps.... ;o) With all the millionaires and billionaires in the world, this would be childsplay to make the Solaris desktop multimedia playback tools as good as the other two major desktops... Ken Mays C'LeeAnn Concepts LLC This message posted from opensolaris.org
