This is my (probably relatively final) reponse to Eric Scheirer's responses
to my posts on audio quality and the standards process regarding SAOL.
I can certainly live with everything Eric said. Although I would prefer
double-precision implementation to be part of the standard, experience with
Csound certainly shows that high-quality output can be had from 32-bit float
implementations writing to 32-bit float soundfiles.
Float soundfiles, however, ARE something I really need.
I don't agree with Eric that Java will fragment; in my experience it is the
opposite and even that Java is becoming the language of first choice in some
important contexts. However, I do agree that the ability of developers to
rely on the standard is more important than incremental additions outside of
the standards process, so enough said there.
Again, what is motivating me to spend a lot of time and trouble
investigating SAOL as a replacement for Csound is this vision of world where
there is a real standard, across commercial and academic boundaries, for
software synthesis. There is an absolutely enormous, and horrifically
wasteful, duplication of effort in music engineering today. God knows how
many people have separately implemented visual patchers, band-limited
pulses, audio I/O, and the like. Too bad these man-centuries didn't go into
making music...
I am in the midst of designing and implementing my all-in-one,
Java-interface version of Sfront. I will post a preliminary version of the
Java file as soon as I have it, and I hope some people will review it and
give me some feedback.
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