| At 11:37 AM -0500 10/21/99, sdbeck@lsu.edu wrote:
>Meredith was heard:
>
>> One fact being: aiff and wave file formats are UNIX and IBM native, not
>> Macintosh file formats.
>
>Not exactly. The AIFF format was (and I believe still is) copyrighted by
>Apple Computer. It was developed as a second-generation audio file format,
>I believe to replace Apple's 8-bit SND resource format. Internally, it is
>quite different from the UNIX-style audio file types (NeXT, IRCAM, etc.)
>which generally have a simple header (1024 bytes) followed by data. AIFF
>has multiple chunks of data of different sizes which can store different
>kinds of information, including compression methods, pitch (for samplers or
>loscils), etc.
after some study, it would appear that aiff is Quicktime format. Quicktime
I've heard of, aiff I have not (before Csound that is). however it will
NOT replace the snd format! (please God!) snd is still stand-alone sound
on the mac, and all system beeps are snd files. What the heck, when I made
the above remark, I looked it up in the Mac Secrets manual - a tome of some
1,000 plus pages of Mac tech info in small print, so if I don't know
something that isn't even in _there_, I don't feel too bad about it. 8-)
>
>WAV was developed by Microsoft as their sound file format. It too is not
>"native" to UNIX. The endian order on the data bytes are reversed between
>most UNIX systems and Wintel systems. Only the Berkeley-style
>(IRCAM/UCSD/NeXT/Sun) formats are truly native to UNIX.
>
>But it is all a moot point. The demands of the marketplace have made AIFF,
>WAV, and IRCAM/UNIX formats accessable from MacOS, Wintel and most UNIX
>platforms.
>
But here _is_ the point, I think. Once that I knew I was looking for a
quicktime file, and that means aiff, I set the output to aiff, 16 bit. I
knew that although I only have 8 bit sound, Quicktime handles 16 bit to 8
bit conversion all the time, automatically. I tried to play the file
Csound made (yes, it made one this time) with the QT player. It played
what I presume is toot1. (hallelujah) You may be interested to note
however, that the file ends with .snd, and it is the first one I've seen
output from Csound.... It is not at all obvious that I must initiate
execution of this resulting file with the Quicktime player - that isn't
mentioned anywhere. It also doesn't mention that after creating said file,
Csound will quit - I mean I don't even have time to read what it has
printed in the messages log. It just up and flings itself into oblivion
without so much as a fare-thee-well. (I thought it was abending - I was
expecting to hear it play a sound, which it _did_ not_ do_) Also, prior to
Quicktime 4, there was no Quicktime player provided with Quicktime (I don't
remember one, though QT3 was not installable on this Mac) - so if somebody
else comes around with this same problem, they aren't going to be able to
play the end result unless they have QT 4, or Tom Erbe's SoundHackNF
(thanks much Tom, I don't need it, but you did give me the clue I needed to
figure this out).
There was no way I could make the leap to _begin_ to get toot1 out of the
tutorial to toot without some better/more specific instructions to _set it
up_. I'm saying you need to make note of this somewhere for your Mac
users. I think it a reasonable suggestion, and if you are taking offense
at it, I'm sorry. I wasn't having trouble with the tutorial files, which
came with the tutorial and I would expect are perfectly correct. I was
having problems with the operation of the Csound software, and that _is_
the responsibility of the person who wrote it, or the person who wrote the
instructions for its operation (or perhaps both) ie, "you folk". You know
full well that Csound is difficult if not flat out impossible to _begin_ to
use - you said so yourself - and you already know it needs some work in
this area, so why blast me for mentioning it. How else was I to find out
what I needed to know?
Merideth
merideth@sky.net ;)-{8-->= li'l wimyn @-{--E=
http://www.sky.net/~merideth/ - visit my poetry page & art gallery
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/9311 - genealogy site
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Board
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If you don't have fuel or sufficient runway for the kind of plane you're
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