On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, John Lazzaro wrote:
> > Is Saol (going to be) accepted?
>
> Sometimes standards take a long time to find the right audience --
> GIF89a is the classic example, an animated GIF standard that needed
> to wait until the world needed animated GIFs (web banner ads) to
> take off. xDSL technologies had a long period before adoption, etc.
>
> I think SA may play out the same way -- its been almost 2 years
> since the ratification of the FDIS, and while for a software
> product that's long enough to assume its dead, for a standard, it
> may just mean that the right application hasn't come along yet.
>
> Personally ...
>
> > How many people are working with it or are developing software for it?
>
> I think the right application revolves around combining SA with
> IETF multimedia networking standards -- RTP, SIP, SDP, QoS methods,
> etc. This is the current direction the research is going with sfront,
> and hopefully we'll be doing a sfront releases in a few months with
> usable networking ... as well as the usual bug-fix releases ...
>
> > I asked myself because there is so little activity on this list.
>
> Our website is usually in the top-10 of bandwidth users for cs.berkeley.edu,
> which does web services for a pretty big CS department ... so, by
> that metric at least, Structured Audio seems to still have active
> users checking out the topic ...
I for one am using "sfront", although it is not the only tool I use and it
is not the only project I'm involved with. One of the lists
(tuning@egroups.com -- microtonalists) I'm on has a number of people
attempting to come up to speed on CSound, and the learning curve, even
with the thousands of lines of existing code and the numerous user
interface wrappers available, is quite steep for a "typical" musician. An
orchestra in SAOL is much more readable than one in CSound's
assembler-like syntax. But it's obvious to me that good wrappers for
musicians and sound designers are a requirement for any digital audio
software or standard to be accepted. I do not actively use CSound, and in
fact Barry Vercoe, the CSound inventor, has said that he believes CSound
users should migrate to SAOL. If it's good enough for Barry Vercoe, it's
good enough for me :-).
-- znmeb@aracnet.com (M. Edward Borasky) http://www.aracnet.com/~znmebIf there's nothing to astrology, how come so many famous men were born on holidays?
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