[Musickit-developer] Snd abstraction mini-whitepaper (flame attractor)

[SKoT M. <sk...@to...>]

Playing around with stream-from-disk and MP3 compressed
experimental Snd's has sent very tiny, ill-greased cogs ticking
over in my mind as to what an Snd should be.

I still think that an Snd should provide an API to get at and query
audio data, and manage a set of performances of such data to
a lesser extent (we store the SndPerformances in their source
Snd for no particular reason - maybe we should separate that
out? After all, each SndPerformance has a handle on its Snd).

...but we are starting to see a range of data access methods
which might be more neatly factored if we have an outer
Snd object, same API as now; but internally we have a data
access object responsible for providing the host Snd with
buffers of samples as needed. So, for example, different
data-access classes might be:

* in-memory (the 'standard', based on a nice big SndAudioBuffer)
* uncompressed-stream-from-disk (SndExpt)
* dynamically-decompressed as needed in-memory-compressed
* web-down-loadable audio data
* live incoming audio (data object provides buffers copied
   from mic, etc)
* or even a synthesizer object (heh heh heh)

etc etc etc.

Thoughts, flames, shouts of Shame! welcome.

- SKoT