Audio File Library Development Notes
Thursday, 15 December 2000
Michael Pruett <mpruett@sgi.com / michael@68k.org>

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Error handling is at the present quite robust, but more work can always
be done in this area.

Recognition of other audio files should include some of the following
file formats which I discovered through the `file' command on Linux:

[ 0 string,=.snd,"Sun/NeXT audio data:"]
[ 0 lelong,=6583086,"DEC audio data:"]
[> 8 string,=WAVE,", WAVE audio data"]
[ 0 belong,=779248125,"realaudio sound file"]
[> 8 string,=AIFF,", AIFF audio"]
[> 8 string,=AIFC,", AIFF-C compressed audio"]
[> 8 string,=SAMP,", SAMP sampled audio"]

I do not know what DEC audio data or SAMP sampled audio are.  I have
no plans to support RealAudio since it provides quite poor sound
quality (that is to say that it sucks a fat dick).

Compressed data formats are not supported.  I would like to add
support for the non-proprietary codecs sometime soon, but I have more
important issues to address first.

SGI's Audio File Library on IRIX implements the following formats which
this version of the library does not:
	Berkeley/IRCAM/CARL SoundFile
	MPEG1 audio bitstream
	Sound Designer II
	Audio Visual Research
	Amiga IFF/8SVX
	SampleVision
	VOC
	SoundFont2

I plan to implement some of these as time permits.  Sound Designer
II is out of the question because of its dependency upon Macintosh
resource forks.  Handling these files on Unix systems is simply not
worth the effort.

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This version of the Audio File Library has been tested under the
following operating environments:
	mips-sgi-irix6.5 / IRIX 6.5 (gcc 2.8.1)
	i386-redhat-linux / Red Hat Linux 6.2 for i386 (egcs 1.1.2)
	i386-debian-linux / Debian Linux 2.2 for i386 (gcc 2.95.2)
	sparc-sun-solaris2.7 / Solaris 2.7 for SPARC (gcc 2.8.1)
