Charles Baker wrote:

> too damn many of these net sound formats...reminds me of the mess with
> audio formats.
> Perhaps some day industry will see a need for a standard, as they did
> with digital synth communication. Like, why did MS need "wav" files, an
> IFF style sound format, which varies basically only in header structure
> from aiff (which was already in use in several os's?)?

One possible reason - to avoid having to byte-swap data on the x86 platform.
The AIFF format is more 'flexible' ( = more easy to get it wrong, and
apparently quite a few products did get it wrong), and it allows format data
to appear after the sound data, making it unreliable for streaming.Still, I
sympathize. You might be interested in the SDIF initiative at CNMAT:
http://cnmat.CNMAT.Berkeley.EDU/SDIF/

- they are trying to define a new soundfile interchange format which is
64-bit ready, and which can
cover audio data, formant data, pvoc data, etc, in a streamable way. It is
~almost~ IFF-compatible, except for the alignment to 8-bye boundaries. I
think this initiative is well worth supporting, and that eventually Csound
should exploit it. It is still at quite an early stage of development, so
this is an opportunity for all interested parties to contribute to the
design of a file format which really meets our needs - well, the needs we
can predict!.

Richard Dobson