PlayObject-questions

[thomas.friedrichsmeier at ruhr-uni-bochum.de]

> > Do you think, it would make sense to have
> > the ability to modify the playback-rate
> > and to make sounds loop in "official" Arts?
> > I saw that there exists a
> > PitchablePlayObject, but I failed to find
> > out how to use it. How do you? And would
> > it be possible to additionally have a
> > LoopablePlayObject? How?
> 
> You could write one.  It is possible to make your own aRts objects.  See 
> kdemultimedia/noatun/library/arts for an example.

Ok, I'm aware of that. The question was (meant to be): If I want to extend all 
sorts of PlayObjects for all sorts of audio-formats in such a way, that they 
support a new feature (or two), how would I go about it? What would be the 
class to derive from and what would I have to take into account? Or is it not 
possible without changing each PlayObject one by one? And BTW, if 
PitchablePlayObject does what I think it does, then how in the world do you 
use it?
Note that my complaint about the arts-documentation does not stem from the 
fact that I understood everything about how arts works - but to the contrary is 
a symptom of me feeling rather lost.

> That's a common complaint.  But, as long as there are only complaints and 
> nobody willing to dig in and make the documentation, the complaints will 
> keep coming.
> 
> In my experience, by the time someone's learned enough to be able to write docs,
> he's spent enough time learning that he needs to go back to working on what he
> needed the docs for! :-)

Sure, none of us have time to give away and so we tend to neglect those 
things that at the moment don't seem all that important - like we might omit the 
comments as long as we're not even sure, if the design of the code is any 
good.
But I've written my complaint in the hope that documenting will be given just 
a slightly higher priority. I think slowly but surely creating at least a decent 
API-doc would not be entirely unrealistic (not tomorrow and not in a month, 
but eventually it could be a lot more useful than it is now) - and after that it 
will also be a lot easier for somebody "to dig in and make the [prosaic, 
professional, proofread and plain wonderful] documenation". This might be 
naive thinking, but you can dream, can't you?

Good night!

Thomas