First of all, I spoke only of Windows because I use it and not Unix. Anyone
who does is welcome to offer input/suggestions/implementations/etc.
As far as getting the triggering info from the server to the client...
The current MSP specs indicate that the strings "!!SOUND()" and "!!MUSIC()"
should be used to trigger .wav and .midi files (respectively). When you talk
about slowing down processing on the
a) server side, all it means is checking for a pref flag and inserting maybe
20 characters into the output stream...
b) client side, all you need is a filter to send messages to a separate thread
which queues and executes the commands (heck, color and (sometimes) vt100
bytes are already filtered, just throw in another couple of cases).
You -could- set up a separate thread/process on another port.. but that brings
up the question 'is the extra overhead of network packets (& the time to
process them) worth not slowing down the main process (by a handful of
bytes)?'
Heck, if one were to desire gif (I say gif because they could be static or
animated.. why have one control for showing jpegs and one for QT movies?)
display capabilities, why not generalize the "MMP" trigger to something like
"!!(file.ext, options)" and have the type determined by the extension?
I don't know who precisely is involved in managing the whole MSP thing, but if
anyone is and likes these ideas or would just like to shoot the bull over it,
drop me a line. I could even design a Win32 client, if/when the need would
arise.
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