Re: sounds and source code

[Conrad Parker <conradp cse unsw edu au>]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 06:36:49PM -0400, Elliot Lee wrote:
> 
> This is totally out of the scope of this list. Please investigate csound,
> MPEG4-SA, or any of the other fine audio synthesis systems.

sorry if you find this discussion off-topic Elliot. It grew out of a
desire to make the sounds we make for the Gnome project maintainable
and freely licensed.

> And for the record, I haven't met anyone with problems editing .wav
> files. :)

editing wav files only lets you do so much; for example if a sound
is synthesized using low-pass filters and the like and you only have
the final wav file, then you can't do things like raise the filter
cutoff, or change the envelope used to modify the cutoff over time,
because that information is lost.

wav files simply aren't good enough for maintaining sounds created
using subtractive synthesis, which is the most common form of
synthesis we have.

As for the topic of this list, yes we should talk more about what we
want from this project, we should be making sounds, and we should be
discussing the technical details of making "sound themes" work in
Gnome.

Conrad.