IASIG Unveils World's First Open Game Audio Specification

Tools for creating interactive audio are pretty hard to come by, and they don't talk to each other. Imagine typing without ASCII. Imagine music without MIDI

This spec is intended to change all that. My most optimistic hope is that IXMF will be to interactive media what MIDI was to keyboard music.

And Sony's gonna use it for audio authoring on Playstation! And some other guys are likely gonna use it, but I'm not supposed to mention them.

If things work out as I hope, proliferation of this standard will cause interaction between tools and between people that far exceeds the initial purposes of the spec itself. Only three people ever used iMUSE, LucasArts wonderful interactive audio authoring tool. Imagine what will happen at a creative level when this stuff gets into the hands of the college kids, the artists, the scores of really creative people out there.

I would encourage you coders out there to download this preliminary spec, geek out with it, and give feedback to the IA-SIG before the spec gets published.

Make something cool if you can. As soon as somebody creates an implementation of this engine or a nice authoring tool, please let us know. One of my clients (a slot machine company) needs to use IXMF to get to the next level of audio, and I don't know if they have the resources to write their own engine. Maybe there's a customer here for a programmer there.

THANKS
-fat

This report from Project Bar B Q shows the motives behind the launching of the IXMF group in 2001-I think you'll find it groovy. It provides some of the non-technical insight beyond what the IA-SIG site shows, particularly as far as what IXMF is meant to do, and the character, motives, and qualification of the people behind it.

PS
It works for video, too, not just audio. But that's another story...