#Music data
3 messages in this thread
Such a standard was proposed (the IFF "SMUS" format…) for musical scores,
yet for some inconcieveable reason the people who created the format
(Electronic Arts…) failed to use it in their own program, except as an
option to save to it instead of their normal format. Sonix uses that
format, with some modifications. It's quite frustrating. Samples sounds,
on the other hand, *are* kept in a standard format… –>Steve Bennett
Thanks. The lack of a standard format sounds (no pun intended) like chaos.
Are there utility programs to convert files so that different application
programs can play them. Is there anything comparable to the ASCII TEXT
format of the word processing world? Are there efforts to develop a
standard? Is MIDI related to all this in any way?
Well, in theory, DMCS should be able to read Sonix files. (In practice, it
*does*, but not always the way you'd expect…) And if you've saved a DMCS
file into SMUS format, you can go the other way. But there isn't anything that
can handle a DMCS native format other than DMCS itself, since EA hasn't given
out the file format…
MIDI is related, but different. MIDI is not a file format, but rather a
hardware specification and a communications protocol used to talk to and
control musical instruments. Both DMCS and Sonix have some support for MIDI,
but not enough. But there is an entire batch of other programs called
*sequencers* which do a decent job.
IFF SMUS is the closest thing we have to an ASCII TEXT format for music. As
you can see, it's not very well supported. It should be a standard, but it
can't be until the various vendors support it properly. (It's also missing
some important features, but those *should* have been put into SMUS a long time
ago… <sigh>)