MIDI

At:
http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG12/#smil2-audio

It states:
"It is an open question what audio formats, if any, would be required
for conformance. For the image element, SVG mandates support of PNG,
JPEG and SVG formats and allows others. All three mandatory formats may
be implemented without royalty payments. Many common audio formats, such
as MP3, require payment of royalties. One option under consideration is
the Vorbis audio compression in the Ogg format. Ogg/Vorbis audio files
are believed to be implementable without royalty payments. Another
option is to say that there are no required formats, and each
implementation supports whatever format the operating system provides.
Clearly, this would lead to non-interoperable, platform-dependent
content."

May I also suggest MIDI files?  They're common, readily available,
widely supported and very very compact.  

I'm trying to figure out how best to distribute a presentation I
recently gave using SVG, minus the impediment of a 2MB MP3 file. The
corresponding MIDI file (not ideal sound, no, but it'll do) is 24K.
MIDI is also sort of the vector format of the music industry, so it
seems to me like a good fit for SVG. (Especially SVG for smaller
devices.)

I'm aware that there are MIME type issues - audio/mime wasn't
registered, and audio/sp-mime seems to have disappeared from the I-D
archives.  I don't know if the W3C has any relation with the MIDI
Manufacturers Association (MMA - http://www.midi.org), or what their
licensing is, but it looks reasonably unencumbered, though publications
cost money.

Also, they're working on an XML format:
http://www.midi.org/dtds/midi_xml.shtml

Might be a nice audio complement to SVG.



-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org

Received on Monday, 11 August 2003 11:54:43 UTC