Mark,

Interesting application! It so happens that I've been working on
some sound compression code for Squeak, based on the GSM 6.10
compression standard and using a publicly available C implementation.
This algorithm compresses speech and music 9.7 to 1 with pretty
good quality for most material. The compressor is a bit computationally
expensive--you'll need a fast PPC to do stereo in real time--but
decompression is much cheaper. Using compression could make it
much easier to do "net-based" broadcasting. Of course, you'd need
a Squeak player to receive the broadcast.

To answer your original question, it should be quite easy to support
playing MIDI thru the QuickTime synth. If anyone is interested in
doing it, I can give you pointers in the right direction. The Win32
VM implementation shows the basic approach. (The QuickTime
documentation makes it look harder that it really is. The Sept 95
issue of "develop", available from Apple's developer web site,
tells you most of what you need to know.)

	-- John

Mark Guzdial <guzdial at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> Our application is a cooperative radio station.  Currently, we have a Swiki
> on which users can upload WAV, AIF, or MIDI files and can edit a PlayList.
> We have a JukeBox process reading the playlist and playing the files
> through Mac audio and an external MIDI synthesizer.  The output of the Mac
> audio and the external MIDI synthesizer is piped into an FM Transmitter.
> This gives us a cooperative radio.