ddailey wrote:
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.
No need to go to particular _applications_ for inspirations when
libraries developed with some generality in mind (e.g.
http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/man/snack2.2/tcl-man.html) can serve as
inspiration already. A carefully chosen subset of Snack might be a good
start.
David
----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave Singer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
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.
I see. However, to repeat what I said previously:
audio =/= music.
The direction you're hinting at would truly justify inventing a new
element, since it sounds like it's specialized to synthesized music. But
that's a pretty narrow subset of what audio encompasses.
Regarding the tediousness of doing things one sample at a time I agree,
but maybe it's not as bad as it sounds. It depends on how fast
JavaScript gets, and Squirrelfish is a very promising step (since the
developers acknowledge they learnt the lessions from Lua, the next
acceleration step could be to copy ideas from luajit, the extremely fast
Lua-to-machine-code JIT compiler). If it gets fast enough, client-side
libraries could do amazing stuff using sample-at-a-time primitives.
Still, as I suggest above, a few higher-level methods could be useful,
-- Markus
