[ Thanks to Jeremy C.
Reed for this link. ]
“What’s life without sound? Sound is a large part of the human
experience, as well as the *BSD experience. Just like popular
operating systems such as Windows, MacOS, and Linux, the BSDs have
their fair share of audio applications that range from manipulation
to players.”
“Waveform players are extremely common today, and the most
common media players can easily handle waveform, or WAV files. In
addition to waveform, MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital
Interface, is often a form of media music is presented in. I say
music because MIDI uses your sound card’s synthesizer, be it
wavetable or otherwise, as a sort of template for the sound of the
MIDI file. This reduces size, but can also make the song very
bland. This also means that no vocals are possible within a MIDI
file, of course. The players of today easily often handle waveform,
but is leaving the primitive MIDI behind due to its lack of
popularity. On top of waveform and MIDI, a new standard is
emerging, which is essentially a compressed waveform sound.”
“Maybe you’ve heard of them — MP3s? MP3s, or MPEG Layer 3
files, offer outstanding compression with little quality loss and
are taking the world by storm. While I’m sure you’ve all heard
of them with the injunctions with Napster and MP3.com, it’s often
hard choosing a player in the sea of applications out
there.“