Audio standards (Was: Re: Octal in embedded system)

On Fri, 2002-11-15 at 06:58, David O'Toole wrote:

[...]

> It's a moot point for now because
> unfortunately, what linux audio software does exist is not very
> interoperable---divergent approaches abound in audio device API's,
> application interconnection protocols, DSP plugin interfaces, instrument
> models, timing, low-latency kernel patches, etc etc etc. Complete chaos,
> as with virtually every domain where the UNIX/GNU/OSS movement is
> experiencing growth. And I am going to make it worse with this weird
> project :-) but this is all a side issue. 

[...]

Last week I was pointed to this site:
http://www.mediaapplicationserver.net/

Which is, as I understand it, an attempt at making an X-like standard
for network-transparent multimedia (audio and video). It has some
high-profile sponsors ( SUN and the London Symphony Orchestra amongst
others ) and an impressive feature list ( though I'm not sure if all of
them are implemented yet ).

Some highlights off the feature list:

* OS independant
* Network transparent
* 32+ bit floating point samples and support of "fixed-point" samples
* a pluggable architecture
* Realtime performance
* MIT / X licence

If they make the deadline for Release Candidate 1 (1 Jan 2003) this
might clean up quite a bit of the mess you described above - if it gets
supported that is.

Joost.