Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!sdcsvax!ucbvax!INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU!hatcher
From: hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: SMUS, DMCS, etc
Message-ID: <8706200548.AA18900@ingres.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Sat, 20-Jun-87 01:48:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: ingres.8706200548.AA18900
Posted: Sat Jun 20 01:48:06 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Jun-87 04:28:37 EDT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 33
Summary: DMCS is a different IFF type than SMUS

In article <3702@spool.WISC.EDU> derek@speedy.WISC.EDU (Derek Zahn) writes:

>However, the only music files I have seen are in "DMCS" format.  Is this
>SMUS?  If so, either I am stupid or DMCS does not use "standard" SMUS or the

DMCS supports two formats: IFF SMUS and its own private IFF DMCS format. The
latter is an unpublished IFF format (which is just crying to be reverse
engineered). Therefore SMUS players will not understand DMCS format files.

Note that the IFF standard allows for "secret" formats like this; the
file header makes it clear that it is an IFF file, and it is composed of
a sequence of chunks, each of which is a 4 byte identifier followed by
a chunk length, so IFF dump programs can print out each chunk, but we
don't know what each chunk signifies (without guessing, that is).

Sonix produces standard IFF SMUS files except that there are chunks
named SNX1 in them. As far as I know the contents of such chunks are
unpublished, but the rest of the file should be playable by any
SMUS player (IFF file readers are supposed to ignore unknown chunk types
rather than breaking). I haven't tried this, though.

Since you *do* have the option, it seems that it would be a kindness
to post the SMUS format of compositions rather than DMCS. Unless...
does anyone know whether the DMCS format supports musical features that
SMUS doesn't?  And how about the SNX1 chunks that Sonix produces? If
the features were reverse engineered then they could be added to the
public SMUS standard and we'd all be happy.

Since some people will always (Murphy's Law) post DMCS files, it would
be a public service to convert them to SMUS and repost to the bulletin
board.
	Doug Merritt		ucbvax!ingres!hatcher (thru Jun 28)
			or 	ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug