Re: File Formats

From: sleeper75se (sleeper75se_at_yahoo.se)
Date: 2002-03-03 03:50:24


Hi John,

I usually stay out of the software discussion (hands full anyway),
but for the moment (gosh, is it really 4.30am?) I'm sort of idle, so
here's my take:

Before defining any data format (which, I don't think we ever
should), we must decide on what to store. Right now we only know we
want to save a series of samples in a number of channels, but that's
about it. To that can we add lots of sideband data: threshold
settings, filter parameters, screen colors, user name, whatever...

Since the information is quite diverse, and undefined, I suggest
storing everything except the samples in a database. A database is
much more abstract, flexible and easier to handle in general than
defining which byte goes where.

The samples (and perhaps any other time-dependant data) on the other
hand, can be stored in a very simple file format, where data from
different "channels" are interleaved.

The reason for splitting up the data is performance. A database is
not very good at handling streams.
(Does anyone have another opinion here?)

Naturally, there must be import/export filters for other data
formats, but we should never have to operate directly (in real time)
on them.

> Should we write multiple channels to the one file?
> or 1 channel 1 file?

Writing one file (containing the samples) is definitely easier on the
hard drive and would simplify network-communication.

Regards,
Andreas



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