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A Programmer's Guide to Sound
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Author: Tim Kientzle
List Price: $49.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201419726
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (17 October, 1997)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 40,723
Average Customer Rating: 2.82 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 1 out of 5
Outdated and Useless Software
This book can be used as a reference toward file formats as applied to sounds. However, I found the software and code examples within the book to be unnecessarily complicated. For instance, the author has a clear obsession to add unnecessary functions toward the API, such as "negotiation" and various levels of abstraction. Under normal circumstances, all parameters (sampling frequency, bits per sample, etc) are known in advance and hence "negotiation" among various sound objects is absurd. I have also found numerious inconsistencies and omissions in the code provided. In Page 42 - Listing 4.6, the author suggests a recursive way to read bytes; nonetheless, if the previous pointer is NULL the code will get into real trouble. In the CD-ROM provided, in order to compile the window player, a key header file is missing: "audiolib.h", I couldn't find it after searching several times. My recommendation is that the material can be used for a quick browse of file formats, but do not get serious in the software solutions because they are not useful.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Good cross-platform intro to sound
This is the only book that I've come across that covers any of the trivialities of cross-platform sound programming. Sure there are better books on the various platform APIs, but they don't cover the differences between playing sound on Windows vs Mac. Small things like signed and unsigned data and byte swapping for 16 bit data are covered here. You won't find these things in Petzold's book. I did find a few small problems in the example code, but if you actually read the book, they're easy to spot. If you're writing cross-platform sound code, this book will be very helpful.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Not of much use
This book is a reasonable reference for audio file formats. I would not recommend it for much more than that. There's also a feel to the text that implies it was written to supliment the sample code rather than the code suplimenting the text.I much prefer the Sine Wave code from Charles Petzold's 5th edition of "Programming Windows" to the code found here. There is much more clarity in the Petzold code (a simple function that can be compiled in C or C++) than the Kientzle code (too much emphasis in doing everything with classes). I would not recommend this to someone wanting to learn how to do more than write a file player.
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