[gmpi] Re: Topic 6: Time representation

[agreeing with Tim, and taking issue with Frederick's statement that "There is no need to carry this kind of annoyance forward into a new standard."]


> The straightforward thing to do is to represent musical time, which is a real number, with one of the builtin data types that C/C++ provides for real numbers, i.e. float or double. Doubles should probably be used to guarantee enough precision. The unit should be a traditional one, either beats or measures, rather than an artifical technical construct like the tick. I would vote for beats.

Disagree - this is not the sort of thing the end musician cares about, but
it IS the sort of thing that impacts the code.

A tick is the hosts finest level of granularity.  This abstraction allows
for hosts to have very fine or very coarse accuracy, depending on the needs
of the situation.

And harmonizes with the stepped time representation used in Standard MIDI Files... and every other mainstream computer musical event timing format I'm aware of. Even SASL uses integers for event times. Yes, this -may- make things more irritating for people writing -certain- classes of algorithmic composition software, but viewed as a fraction of the target developer population that group would be quite small, whereas I think it could reasonably be argued that we should be optimizing GMPI for the most common use cases.

I mean, yes, time is fluid, but then again so's pitch. Should we be using floats for note pitches too...?

-- Chris

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