On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Charles G Waldman wrote:
3. Play some raw audio data, given a string of bytes and a sampling rate.
This would never be possible unless you also specifed the format and encoding of the raw data - are they 8bit, 16-bit, signed, unsigned, bigendian, littlendian, linear, logarithmic ("mu_law"), etc?
You're right, you do have to specify such things. But when you do, i'm quite confident that this should be possible, at least for a variety of common cases. Certainly raw audio data should be playable in at least *some* fashion, and we also have a bunch of very nice functions in the audioop module that can do automatic conversions if we want to get fancy.
Trying to do anything with sound in a platform-independent manner is near-impossible. Even the same "platform" (e.g. RedHat 6.2 on Intel) will behave differently depending on what soundcard is installed.
Are you talking about OSS vs. ALSA? Didn't they at least try to keep some of the basic parts of the interface the same? -- ?!ng