Building converters is easy. Geting the format specs is not. On Fri, 11 Jan 2002, Martin G. McCormick wrote: > I will weigh in a bit on this topic. Everybody else > around me primarily uses Microsoft Windows and related products. > This whole campus of roughly twenty-thousand students and another > three-thousand give or take a few hundred staff members uses and > sometimes barely uses Windows and products that run on Windows. > We have a few Mac users and those of us who are FreeBSD and Linux > users, but I feel great if I can just hand somebody a file and > say, "Here. This is what you needed." > > Information is what this game is all about and my hope is > that Linux will make it easier for computer users who are blind > to function along side everyone else. > > I send and receive ASCII files all the time and people > use them, but just as we would rather get sound files we can > play and text files we can read without doubling the cost of our > work stations or going to a lot of various other forms of hassle, > the general user community wants stuff they can use without a lot > of trouble. > > Utilities that convert one format in to another should be > our stock and trade since smart employers and instructors will > not get nearly as hung up about whether or not we can do this or > that job if we can simply make our system work with the existing > infrastructure. > > I am not ranting at anybody or saying that anybody is > wrong, only that I like it if I can take something I am > comfortable using, feed it in to a filter or format converter and > come out with some gibberish in standard output or sent to some > file that the other guy is happy with. > > I don't know how many care, but this happens all the time > when you make an international telephone call. > > The digital ISDN lines in Europe and many other countries > use something called A-law encoding for audio. It is a > piece-wise handling of the logarithmic values which > represent sound levels. > > In North America, our ISDN lines have a piece-wise > logarithmic function which is slightly different. It is called > MU-Law encoding. Audio encoded with one scheme sounds positively > terrible if received on a telephone built for the other system so > there are digital converters that substitute MU-Law for A-Law > encoding as the audio flies back and forth across the pond. > > I believe that our /dev/audio device is set up to receive > MU-Law signals, here, and you can set your /dev/audio in Europe > for A-Law, but I may be dead wrong. My point is that it is a > neighborly thing to do if you can communicate with the rest of > the world in a manner that works for all. > > We Linux users probably have more flexibility built in to > the operating system than non-UNIX users so building converters > should be a lot less painful for us. > > I am sorry if this sounds like a rant, but it is a > positive rant if such a thing exists. > > Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK > OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Network Operations Group > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Blinux-list@redhat.com > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list >