[PATCH] Update protocols to support tone generation.

[Andrei . Kholodnyi]

> The emacspeak speech server that I am working on will certainly use
> tones. The server provides a tone function which is used by emacspeak.

could you please briefly describe how it works now? do you use sound icons?
or do you produce tones in your app and send them to SD?

> A reason why tones are superior to sound icons for some uses is that for
> example the duration of a tone can be used to indicate something. An
> example of this is indentation. The duration of the tone denotes the  
> indentation level.

well, it is possible to create a sound icon which corresponds eg  
indentation level 2/4/8
and then just repeat it.

> If we were to use sound icons for this we would need an icon for every
> duration of tone that could possibly be used.

why? we just need to create most used sound icons and the majority of the  
users will be fine with it.

> Although it is conceivable that you could have a large amount of sound  
> icons, why would
> you if it was not necessary and if you encountered a case for which you
> had no icon then things would break.

Have you any particular example?
why should user encounters such a case?
user should have a possibility to associate a sound icon (predefined or  
generated by the user) with an action.

> As far as I know the abillity to play tones has traditionally been  
> provided by many
> hardware synths.

I see, but all sw synths AFAIK do not have such a feature, and people live  
pretty well w/o it.

> Given that there is currently a patch and someone
> willing to do the work my take on this is that it is a worthwhile
> feature and is not adding any large amount of bloat or complexity to
> SD. Also as it introduces no external dependencies this is a good thing.

yes, that's true.
However it looks like that your application is the only one which needs  
this feature.
And probably the problem you face could be solved differently.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against this functionality.
I just try to understand do we really need it.

Andrei.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: 
<http://lists.freebsoft.org/pipermail/speechd/attachments/20101024/51d20ca7/attachment.htm>