Xref: utzoo rec.music.synth:4952 comp.sys.next:150
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From: pardo@june.cs.washington.edu (David Keppel)
Newsgroups: rec.music.synth,comp.sys.next
Subject: Music boxes (Was:Re: NeXT!)
Message-ID: <6160@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 21 Oct 88 18:50:28 GMT
References: <881019-085756-6643@Xerox> <1127@leah.Albany.Edu> <2881@sugar.uu.net>
Reply-To: pardo@uw-june.UUCP (David Keppel)
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 19

In article <2881@sugar.uu.net> peter@sugar.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>[ For the comp.sys.next people, they've been talking about using NeXT as
>  a realtime music synthesiser, based on the DSP chip... ]
>
>One thing to consider. The NeXT machine is running [Mach],
>which is not a realtime operating system. A synth is a pretty hard-
>realtime environment.

There are at least two music synthesis systems that I am aware of that
run in real time under Smalltalk.  Smallktalk is not a real-time
environment either and you *can* get glitches, but modern Smalltalk
mostly do incremental garbage collection and are smart about
explicitly freeing (compiler-)recognizable garbage.

It might be a problem on the NeXT box, but I doubt it.

	;-D on  ( Bias, bias, bias, how about some equalization? )  Pardo
-- 
		    pardo@cs.washington.edu
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