[Etoys] Fwd: Speex encoded audiobooks

[Takashi Yamamiya]

Hi Bert,

> (1) the sound quality is worse than when I played it in VLC

One clue is sppex is usually compressed with 4000/8000 Hz. But
SoundPlayer on Squeak plays 22050 Hz. Maybe this mismatch makes the
noise.

> (2) the image locks up because the file reader service does not
> return until the whole file is played
>
> (3) the SharedQueue in the QueueSound gets ever longer because new
> buffers are added even if there are still lots of buffers enqueued
> 
> Not sure what could be done about (1). About (2), we should not fork
> a different process but let SoundPlayer do its thing. Perhaps
> something similar like StreamingMonoSound (or can we use this
> directly?). This should also solve (3).

Yes, actually .spx and .ogg service was only for my debugging purpose ;)
Because the first goal was for SoundRecorder, I have never thought
it as a serious sound player. But, yes, now it is good opportunity.

> Also, we should put up some visual representation, maybe a mini
> SoundRecorder without the recording controls, which should be simple
> once we use a proper StreamingSound.
> 
> One nice thing would be the ability to stream directly from a URL
> rather than from a file. Like, so we could make a  project that has a
> morph for each of the Looking Glass chapters and plays them directly
> from the web ...

I agree. If I could say my ideal. We should give only enough parts to
make something instead of application itself. For example, if there
were URL morph which retrieve a data stream from the web or a file,
and a DecoderMorph decodes it as a sound stream, and a
SoundPlayerMorph plays it. You could make your own web browser with
such URL morph.

Cheers,
- Takashi