[Newbies] audio query

[Karl Ramberg]

Kenneth Sherwood wrote:
> As a writer and non-programmer (high school Fortran in 1986) who has 
> used out-of-the-box tools such as flash and dreamweaver, I've just 
> begun teaching myself Squeak--which was recommended by a hypertext 
> writer/aquaintence Jim Rosenberg.  My interest is in building 
> interactive text / audio projects and live-art-performance tools in a 
> user-defined workspace apart from the constraints/habits associated 
> with Flash and Director, and without the platform dependence and 
> proprietary concerns.  I've gathered what seem to be the "classic" 
> beginner texts: Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots, Squeak: A Quick 
> Trip to ObjectLand, and Squeak: Object-Oriented Design with Multimedia 
> Application (Guzdial).
> Can anyone speak to the multimedia potential of Squeak and/or its 
> likely development trajectory, especially with regard to audio? The 
> midi tools and synthesis look promising, but as I've mostly worked 
> with recorded voices, I was worried to see no apparent support for 
> compressed audio. Most of my searching in the news-groups has turned 
> up dead-ends, like the tool called "Siren" that is now written for a 
> different smalltalk dialect. I see the Guzdial now seems to be 
> publishing books on Python and Java as "multimedia" languages, and I 
> sense much development work must be going into Croquet. 
>  
> So in short, can someone with experience using squeak in a multi-media 
> presentational format, especially audio, reassure me that what will be 
> the somewhat steeper learning curve (for a self-taught, 
> non-programmer) will pay off?
In the etoy version of Squeak we now have Ogg and Speex compression for 
audio files:

http://etoys.laptop.org

You may also find this project interesting

http://www.zogotounga.net/GM/eGM0.html

Karl