Date: June 7, 1999
Present: Anastasia Cheetham, Karen McCall, Tamar Weiss, David Bolter, Jutta
Treviranus, Joseph Scheuhammer.
Regrets: Lake Porter
The purpose of this meeting was to decide on a set of tasks to perform for the next meeting, and thereby set an agenda for the next meeting. This was done in order to get the ball rolling again. In addition, the issue of MIDI was discussed.
At the previous meeting, Lake posed the question, can we use MIDI for the non-speech audio?
Jutta said that she has been playing with MIDI on Macintosh and gives it a big thumbs-up. She will mail information to Karen so that Karen and Lake can look into using MIDI to (re)create the sound effects.
Allen has stated that the version of JMF used in the audio plaf does not handle MIDI, but that the latest version may. He will not investigate further unless given instructions to do so.
David noted that his Cacophony program (the alternative to JMF/JSAPI) would require modification to use Windows MIDI facilities.
The question then arises as to whether there is a better way to handle MIDI. Joseph suggested that he, and perhaps Allen, take a close look a QuickTime for Java. The reasons are three-fold: (1) it is Java programming, (2) QuickTime is available on Windows and Macintosh, (3) QT handles MIDI very well.
David noted a drawback is that QuickTime is not available on Unix, and no one knows whether it ever will be. Joseph replied that currently JMF only runs on Windows; that we actually gain a platform if going the QT route. Here is another thought: JMF is supposed to handle QT -- in fact, at JavaOne '98, there was a demo of JMF playing a QT movie on Solaris. So, if we put the midi in QT movie files, perhaps JMF will play them, eventually.
The password for the web site will be removed.
The agenda for the next meeting:
The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Friday June 25th, at 11:30am.
Joseph Scheuhammer 99 Jun 04.