HC Music that should be on Runtime Revolution

[Richard Gaskin]

Colin Holgate wroteL

> The "those" I was referring to would have been external files that are  
> in the standalone bundle. I'm not sure how a file player can play  
> media if you're not allowed to make the media be a file as part of the  
> solution.

FWIW, I thought yours was a darn clever solution.

If you write to a file in specialFolderPath("temporary") you'll get the 
file without risk of permission errors, while avoiding ever having the 
file seen by the user.

> What's the downside of playing it as a file?

Latency.  For things like whole MIDI files (which will require a fairly 
substantial subsystem anyway, whether it's QT or something else) it's 
probably not so bad, but the desire to see multi-channel sound using 
Rev's built-in soundClips is motivated by circumstances where minimal 
latency is appreciated.

This post from Judy helped me appreciate such cases:
<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-revolution/2009-January/119554.html>

While such cases are somewhat rare as she notes there, if you need the 
fastest possible responsiveness its hard to beat soundClips, since 
they're already attached to the stack in memory.


The more I think about it, however, the more I find myself wondering how 
satisfying it would be if it were available.

If you're writing for a machine old enough that such things matter you 
need to be very prudent with RAM, so the number of soundClips needs to 
be kept to a minimum.

Given that, and that older machines have so little RAM, I guess the 
central question is, "What sorts of sounds would one want to play?"

While referring to HC's notation as "door bell jingles" may sound 
derisive, these days when people are accustomed to richer sound design, 
it's not an entirely unfair characterization to the modern ear.

For music that leaves us with MIDI as arguably the best balance between 
file size and audio quality.  But while MIDI files are small, the 
subsystems needed to play them are not, leaving us back to pondering the 
balance of responsiveness and quality.

So if not for music, then what is the anticipated usage for such an 
external?

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Revolution training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com