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SuiteSound Abstract

SuiteSound: A System for Distributed Collaborative Multimedia


John Riedl, Vahid Mashayeki, Jim Schnepf, Mark Claypool, Dan Frankowski

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
August 1993


Multimedia has the same potential to revolutionize human-computer interfaces that bitmapped workstations have realized over the last decade by providing a more familiar environment to the users. Achieving this potential requires the development of programming environments with integrated support for multimedia. SuiteSound is one such environment. SuiteSound is built in the Suite object-based system on a conventional UNIX operating system. SuiteSound objects incorporate multimedia by creating flows and filters. Flows are streams of multimedia data moving through a sequence of objects. They bridge the gap between objects representing the state of an entity at a discrete point in time and space and continuous media such as live audio or video. Filters are intermediate objects between the source and destination of a flow. They take a flow as input, perform one of several operations such as multiplex-in, multiplex-out, gain control, or silence deletion on it, and send the resulting flow to its destination. In effect, they provide a virtual device interface for the application programmer that is uniform and independent of any physical device. This paper describes the design and implementation of SuiteSound on the Sun SparcStation. We perform experiments to determine the network and CPU load of the sound tool, detail experiences using the SuiteSound environment and applications, and suggest future work.


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