| 'snd' resources were/are used on Mac's for system sounds and very short
sounds associated with apps. It is a mixed format which contains PCM
(audio data) and/or synthesizer playback instructions. They are stored
in the resource fork.
However, the resource fork is not a suitable location (for a variety of
programming reasons) for large (>32k) chunks of data. One reason is
that resources can only be loaded as complete blocks of memory, and 68k
Macs could only easily load <32k of memory at a time, because the memory
addresses were only 16 bit numbers. 32k is only .185 seconds of
44.1/16bit audio, which, as you can imagine, would severely limit your
csound (or any audio) composing.
For this reason, Apple created the AIFF file format (which actually
significantly predates QuickTime). The AIFF data was stored in the data
fork, for which the only logical limit was the available space on your
hard drive. Furthermore, the data fork can be accessed in little
chunks, so that an application did not have to read the entire file into
memory just to play it. At its simplest, an AIFF file is 54 bytes of
header info and all of the sound samples, though the files can store
many other types of data as well (such as MIDI instrument numbers,
copyright infor, etc...).
You mentioned SoundHack, which is probably the premiere sound format
utility for the Mac. AIFF files may have sound data at any sample rate
and at 8 bit, 16 bit, 24 bit, 32 bit integers and 32 bit floats, as well
as compressed data. Not all of these will be readable by all
applications. I understand that you are using a 68k Mac, so the
auto-playback ability in CsoundPPC is not available to you. You might
look on the web for EasyAIFF (which used to be bundled with CSoundPPC)
which is a very simple AIFF file player.
Hope this explains some things.
--
Mike Berry
mikeb@nmol.com |