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From: eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Sound
Message-ID: <412@toaster.SFSU.EDU>
Date: 22 Mar 90 03:29:57 GMT
References: <404@toaster.SFSU.EDU> <7344@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Reply-To: eps@cs.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Organization: San Francisco State University
Lines: 31

In article <7344@hydra.gatech.EDU> iansmith@warhol.gatech.edu
	(Ian Smith) writes:
>Sound on workstations is a long way from being standardized.  Until there is
>such a standard we will all have to just use sound programs specific to our
>architechture.

>          Sun may be attempting to do this with is /dev/audio implementation on
>the Sparcstation, but its a long way from doing the whole job.

Take your SPARCstation audio file and incant

sndconvert -o nextified.snd -f 1 -s 8012.8210513 -c 1 -r sun-sound

All this does it put a descriptive header on it.  It does not
change the data itself.  Surprise!  They're binary compatible!
(If you don't believe me, take a NeXT voice file and copy it to
/dev/audio on a SPARCstation 1.  It will be clearly intelligible,
except for a little garbage at the beginning.)  OK, we're only
talking about telephone-quality audio, but already you've got the
makings of a de facto standard.

Now--who's going to volunteer to produce a mail program for the
SPARCstation 1 that is interoperable with NeXT Mail?  (It doesn't
have to look the same onscreen (it can look just like mailtool
for all I care), it just has to be network-compatible).

The reality is that we have both NeXTs and SPARCstations, we will
continue to have both, and we want them to work together to the
maximum extent possible.

					-=EPS=-