SysEx interface for softsynths [was Re: [linux-audio-dev] LADSPA and TiMidity++]

[David Olofson]

On Wednesday 18 September 2002 21.55, Richard Bown wrote:
[...]
> If we were going to the trouble of providing this kind of interface
> for the benefit of sequencers and softsynths it'd be nice to define
> (and perhaps extend) existing softsynth APIs such as the one that
> MuSE already employs perhaps?  Standardisation at the functional
> level and perhaps defining a draft API definition could prove a
> worthwhile interim exercise.

If it's going beyond the "grab patch names" level - which would make 
it very cool and useful - I think it should be implemented as some 
sort of binary "markup language", describing all controls and their 
relations in the form of a tree or other structure. (Maybe just 
nodelist style "object A affects object B", possibly with some simple 
hint as to *how* A affects B; ie scale, offset, modulate etc...)

It's probably pretty hard to have a generic application deal with 
Audiality scripts as anything but raw text, though... ;-)

Then again, that's just fine with me. I've never created real sounds 
from scratch as quickly as with Audiality. The only feature I'm 
missing is hitting F2 in cooledit (the *text* editor :-) 
automatically making the synth reload and re-run the script. (I 
actually did that once, sort of, by mmapping the file. It worked on 
one machine, but on another, writing the file would not write the 
memory buffer... *heh*)


//David

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.- David Olofson -------------------------------------------.
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