On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Hans-Jörg Bibiko wrote:
On 27.08.2008, at 17:21, Hans-Jörg Bibiko wrote:
On 27.08.2008, at 17:06, Simon Urbanek wrote:
To be precise to play an audio file all you do is
[[[NSSound initWithContentsOfFile:fileName byReference:YES] autorelease]
play];
Thats' all :)
Ah, you mean that the function play(A_SOUND_FILE) should be part of R's
core code which implements it for a given platform.
This of course would be the best way.
No, because that just throws the problem onto R-core, including long-term
maintenance, for what is a real minority interest. It should be a
user-maintained package.
I thought about it a bit. For Mac it would be trivial, but for Windows and
Linux I do not know. They have to support many sound card drivers. For Linux
you have different window servers, and distributions.
The next point once you have such a built-in function like playSoundFile(f)
how to control it, i.e how to stop it for instance; esp. for the case that
you're playing more than one sound file at a time (which works a Mac with
play very well).
To use the approach to open a sound file by the default application is in
some sense better. On Mac it's easy, just type 'open FILE', for Windows this
works only in some cases. One could use 'start FILE' but 'start' is not an
executable it's a DOS command thus one could write a BAT file open.BAT à la
'start %1'.
Please do your homework: Windows R has long provided shell.exec() and as
from R 2.8.0 will have open.exe (for use in shell scripts such as
Rd2dvi.sh).
So all you need to do on Windows R is shell.exec("filename"), even easier
than Simon's suggestion.
The tricky point is Linux in that respect I believe.
What about all the other platforms R runs on -- FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX,
IRIX, ...?
I do not know any command which can do this. The Linux shell command
'play' is not part of any distribution. This leads to a next problem. If
there would be a general solution to play a sound file using the default
app OK but if the user can set up the player to 'mplayer32.exe', or
'play' etc. how to distinguish between a shell command, which could run
in the background (how to control it?), and a app based program like
'Windows Media Player' or 'QuickTime' etc.?
The only idea I have for now is to use a scripting language to write a
primitive audio player, and the only language which is installed by default
on all these platforms is Java. It shouldn't be that problem to write such a
JFrame jar.
But having a working Java is a problem.
Cheers,
--Hans
--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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