[freepats] software project

[ml at distasis.com]

I'm working on a build system project.  One of the end goals is to create
a lightweight, cross-platform Open Source software distribution that might
be useable by educational facilities.  So, I've been researching
multimedia applications with an emphasis on lightweight, cross-platform
and patent unencumbered Open Source programs.  Programs I definitely want
to include are abcmidi, abcm2ps, timidity++, milkytracker and sox.  If
anyone has recommendations for other programs, please let me know.

I found several command line wave utilities.  One set of utilities has a
wave viewer but it's designed to work with svga or conio, so I've ported
it to work with SDL for systems that don't support the other options. 
I've also been trying to update apcstudio, make it less buggy and add some
features.  I ran across mention of several pat utilities.  There are quite
a few in a copy of an older Timidity fork called gt.  There's another
utility here:  http://www.squeep.com/~steve/guspatch-tools-0.1.tar.bz2  If
anyone knows any background on why the utilities are no longer included
with Timidity++ and only seem to be available with the older fork, I'd be
very interested to know about it.  I think I can get many of these
programs to build cross-platform with a little patching to make sure that
issues like endian settings and binary I/O are fixed.  Am wondering if
some of these programs are still useable or if they're too dated and have
been replaced by something better.  Also, some seem to have similar
functionality, so I'm not sure which would be best to include and which
aren't needed or are redundant.  If anyone has any recommendations, I'd
greatly appreciate hearing them.

At one point we discussed the possibility of a set of lightweight patch
files for Timidity+ for systems that didn't have a lot of disk space.  I
ran across Timidity-tiny at http://edge.beemulated.net/utils/index.php. 
Was able to trace the files back to a KDE project.  Haven't been able to
get any farther than that in finding their origins.  Don't see any sign of
copyright in the files when viewed with a hex editor and the KDE project
claimed they were safe to use.  Was wondering if anyone had any opinions
or knew anything further about it.

If anyone would like to discuss lightweight Open Source music applications
(finding them, porting issues, build issues, etc.), I'd really like to
hear from them.

Thanks.

Sincerely,
Laura
http://www.distasis.com/recipes/music.htm