[whatwg] Audio canvas?

I recall a little app called soundEdit (I think) that ran in the Mac back in 
the mid 1980's. I think it was shareware (at least it was ubiquitous).

The editing primitives were fairly cleanly defined and, had a reasonable 
metaphoric correspondence to the familiar drawing actions.

There was a thing where you could grab a few seconds of sound and copy it 
and paste it; you could drag and drop; you could invert (by just subtracting 
each of the tones from a ceiling) you could reverse (by inverting the time 
axis). You could even go in with your mouse and drag formants around. It was 
pretty cool.

It would not be a major task for someone to standardize such an interface 
and I believe any patents would be expired by now.

David
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Singer" <singer@apple.com>
To: <whatwg at lists.whatwg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 2:25 PM
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Audio canvas?


> At 20:18  +0200 16/07/08, Dr. Markus Walther wrote:
>>
>>get/setSample(<samplePoint> t, <sampleValue> v, <channel> c).
>>
>>For the sketched use case - in-browser audio editor -, functions on sample 
>>regions from {cut/add silence/amplify/fade} would be nice and were 
>>mentioned as an extended possibility, but that is optional.
>>
>>I don't understand the reference to MIDI, because my use case has no 
>>connection to musical notes, it's about arbitrary audio data on which MIDI 
>>has nothing to say.
>
> get/set sample are 'drawing primitives' that are the equivalent of 
> get/setting a single pixel in images.  Yes, you can draw anything a pixel 
> at a time, but it's mighty tedious.  You might want to lay down a tone, or 
> some noise, or shape the sound with an envelope, or do a whole host of 
> other operations at a higher level than sample-by-sample, just as canvas 
> supports drawing lines, shapes, and so on.  That's all I meant by the 
> reference to MIDI.
> -- 
> David Singer
> Apple/QuickTime
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 16 July 2008 14:57:13 UTC