12 Mar
2005
12 Mar
'05
7:18 a.m.
On Fri, 11 Mar, 2005 at 11:52PM +0100, Christoph Eckert spake thus:
I agree that XML isn't necessarily hard to read, but imagine 3 or 4
levels of hierarchy, with between 5 and 15 parameters in each. The
format used by sf2text (which doesn't even consider all parameters) is
quite slim compared to XML-style tagging and yet the output can be
huge.
I'm an optimistic person. For me the glass is always full, even if
most of it is just full of carbon dioxide, oxygen and other gases.
Hi,
Well, you could at least start with what you want from the new
format. What exactly do you want that soundfonts can't provide?
Why not start it then? Even if you're not a
coder, you can
start drafting the requirements and a human level
specification.
well, to be honest, I'm not a coder, and I'm not familiar
enough with sampling to create specs. Sounds as a wiki would
be helpful. Forget XML,
packing and whatknot and just
describe, hierarchically or otherwise, what the file should
contain.
XML is hip, nothing else :) .
Anyway, maybe it's wrong for a sampling format, but otherwise
the advantage is that it is easily human readable as well as
machine creatable.
Just some hours before I read that there are people who'd like
to create soundfonts automatically on remote machines; so the
new format should be able to be created via shell scripts as
well as defined easily be blind users or GUI frontends. So I
guessed that XML isn't the least choice.
Even if you are a coder, don't always jump
for XML. While
it's certainly human readable, it's often about as easy to
read as a postscript file (also human readable).
This depends on the format. XML is a syntax or markup; you're
right, there are XML files which are not very human readable.
But we can do it better :) . Anyway, my
suggestion is: get the ball rolling. Once it's
specced, all that's needed is a library for processing the
file and it would be a fairly simple job to make things
like fluid work with the new format.
I'm not that optimistic, but maybe I'm wrong.
Best regards
ce
--
"I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated
Development
That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you."
(By Vance Petree, Virginia Power)