Welcome to the home page for the SDIF standards effort. We look forward to your feedback and participation.
This effort was suggested by Xavier Rodet of IRCAM. Discussions with scholars and vendors at the 1995 ICMC confirmed the need for this standard in the academic and commercial communities . Adrian Freed coined the name and invited ICMC delegates to participate in the development work. Discussions over the months led to new requirements for the standard particularly in the area of internet applications. Also, although originally conceived of as a portable (and not necessarily efficient) interchange format, CNMAT and IRCAM have decided to use it as the primary working format for sound analysis and synthesis tools. This has resulted in a standard grounded in real needs and field tested.
CNMAT and IRCAM have been evolving and improving the standard. We presented SDIF to the analysis/synthesis community at ICMC97 in Thessaloniki and found widespread support and approval. Also at ICMC97, Xavier Serra, Jordi Bonada, Perfecto Herrera, and Ramon Loureiro presented "Integrating complementary spectral models in the design of a musical synthesizer," describing their use of SDIF in the SMS project.
At ICMC98 we presented a poster on SDIF, and met again with the analysis/synthesis community to discuss SDIF.
The "S" in SDIF now stands for "sound" rather than "spectral", reflecting changes to make the format more general and able to represent sound in non-spectral as well as spectral domains.
SDIF used to be called SDIFF (Interchange File Format). The word "file" was removed because Internet applications demand sound descriptions as "streams". The SDIF standard now addresses three contexts in which sound descriptions are commonly used:
UNIX, MAC, NT, etc. :*.sdif
DOS: *.sdf
Audio file formats: ftp://ftp.cwi.nl:/pub/audio/
The Lemur File Format: http://datura.cerl.uiuc.edu/Lemur/LemurDocFormat.html
MPEG-4 Structured Audio standard: http://sound.media.mit.edu/mpeg4
Compressed PostScript version of Stephen Pope's and Guido Van Rossum's "A Child's Garden of Sound File Formats"
Kelly Fitz's Incomplete Bibliography of Sound Modeling Research Based on Sinusoidal Techniques
Gerd Castan's list of Music Notation Formats: http://www.music-notation.info/en/compmus/index.html
Tim Thompson's list of programming languages used for music: http://209.233.20.72/tjt/plum.html