### From The MPEG-4 Structured Audio Book by John Lazzaro and John Wawrzynek.

# Part V: Special Topics

## Introduction

MPEG-4 Structured Audio (MP4-SA) is an ISO/IEC standard (edited by Eric Scheirer) that specifies sound not as audio data, but as a computer program that generates audio when run.

For an introduction to MP4-SA see the introductory tutorial presented in Part I of the book. For a complete description of the SAOL language, see Part II.

In Part V of the book, we show ways to solve common problems that arise when writing SAOL programs.

In the first chapter we show useful methods for debugging MP4-SA programs. We describe an sfront extension to SAOL for program debugging: a rate-sensitive version of the C printf statement.

In the second chapter we describe an advanced SAOL language feature, the template construct. Templates are a concise way to generate a family of instruments whose properties vary in a regular way.

In the third chapter we describe Slib, a SAOL library distributed with sfront that provides support utilities to simplify low-level SAOL programming.

Next:Part V/1: SAOL Debugging

## Part V: Table of Contents

#### 1. Debugging SAOL Programs

- Reported Errors.
- Program Crashes.
- Finding Runtime Errors.
- `printf`.
- I-rate Methods.
- K-rate Methods
- A-rate Methods

#### 2. Templates

- A Simple Example
- Template Variables
- Preset Maplists

#### 3. The Slib Library

- Trigonometric Opcodes.
- Numeric Constants.
- Symbolic Constants.
- The Scaled Smoothed MIDI Library.
- MIDI Constants.
- General MIDI Presets.

Copyright 1999 John Lazzaro and John Wawrzynek.