I recall a little app called soundEdit (I think) that ran in the Mac back in
the mid 1980's. I think it was shareware (at least it was ubiquitous).
The editing primitives were fairly cleanly defined and, had a reasonable
metaphoric correspondence to the familiar drawing actions.
There was a thing where you could grab a few seconds of sound and copy it
and paste it; you could drag and drop; you could invert (by just subtracting
each of the tones from a ceiling) you could reverse (by inverting the time
axis). You could even go in with your mouse and drag formants around. It was
pretty cool.
It would not be a major task for someone to standardize such an interface
and I believe any patents would be expired by now.
David
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Singer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <whatwg@lists.whatwg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 2:25 PM
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Audio canvas?
At 20:18 +0200 16/07/08, Dr. Markus Walther wrote:
get/setSample(<samplePoint> t, <sampleValue> v, <channel> c).
For the sketched use case - in-browser audio editor -, functions on sample
regions from {cut/add silence/amplify/fade} would be nice and were
mentioned as an extended possibility, but that is optional.
I don't understand the reference to MIDI, because my use case has no
connection to musical notes, it's about arbitrary audio data on which MIDI
has nothing to say.
get/set sample are 'drawing primitives' that are the equivalent of
get/setting a single pixel in images. Yes, you can draw anything a pixel
at a time, but it's mighty tedious. You might want to lay down a tone, or
some noise, or shape the sound with an envelope, or do a whole host of
other operations at a higher level than sample-by-sample, just as canvas
supports drawing lines, shapes, and so on. That's all I meant by the
reference to MIDI.
--
David Singer
Apple/QuickTime
