Re: midi player?

[Zack Williams <zdw u arizona edu>]

> Midi support is another matter entirely.  It may make sense to have a
> single midi process writing to /dev/sequencer at a time, and be able to
> send that midi stream via the network, but two such processes could
> easily step on each other's "sound palettes", and cause great cacophony,
> on the order of John Cage (e.g. Music for Twelve Radios).  As such, I am
> hesitant at this time to add midi support to EsounD.

Midi is an example of a medium that should not be mixed with other music 
streams of the same type. I had always assumed the simultaneous sound features 
of EsounD were to be used not to mix music, but to allow output of user event 
sounds (warnings, sounds from window manager events, etc.) Having any two 
simultaneous, contiuous sound streams, no matter what the format, would result 
in an undesireably cacophony. For formats such as midi or mod that can really 
only play contiunous music, it would not be a great limitation to only allow one
of these formats to play at once. Even better would be one continuous music
stream per channel, for even greater flexibility. 

Anyway, in the case of midi, the samples are typically stored on the end that
produces the sound, like in the sound rendering program or on a synthesizer, 
so the sound pallets would not get munged. Mod is a different story altogether, 
but if we limit EsounD to one music stream per channel we should be fine.

Zack (feeling exposed from all of this non-lurking)

#-----------------------------------------------------------------#
# Zack Williams  zdw@u.arizona.edu  http://www.u.arizona.edu/~zdw #
#                                                                 #
#   Linux is like an arcwelder - it is insanely powerful in the   #
#        right hands, but most people get by with JB Weld         #
#-----------------------------------------------------------------#